10 ms·

Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

144 points by zdw 10mo ago

measurablefunc 10mo ago
This is nothing, wait until Zuckerberg delivers those 15 virtual "friends" he promised & they start shilling for whoever is the highest bidder.
tehjoker 10mo ago
this might be a submarine advertisement. someone is pitching their startup near the bottom of the article
- jasonlotito 10mo ago
  Submarine? It says Advertising at the top.
  - smallerize 10mo ago
    That's just the category of news this is. It doesn't mean it's an ad.
- smallerize 10mo ago
  I don't think so. It goes against their sponsored content policies https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts Specifically, it should be labelled, and editorial staff are not involved in making it.
agumonkey 10mo ago
there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of something for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
- atomic128 10mo ago
  Poison Fountain https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
  - agumonkey 10mo ago
    interesting, i didn't know about this effort
- design2203 10mo ago
  Because there is an obsession re. Financial wealth as opposed to the creation of real wealth. The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.
  - neom 10mo ago
    Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes as they say. Hyper consumerism, status symbols, a fundamentally pack/tribal species? what could possibly go wrong?
  - immibis 10mo ago
    The way around this, by the way, is to create some kind of alternative exchange system that only admits real-for-real exchange and makes hoarding money impossible.
    - danaris 10mo ago
      No; the way around this, as it always has been, is redistribution. I know it's considered a dirty word in many circles nowadays, but by far the most effective means we know of disincentivizing a singleminded focus on the accumulation of wealth is to make that number something you can't keep pushing up after a certain point. No human being will ever be genuinely discouraged from making a better product or making themselves better at doing something because they couldn't turn their (personal, not company) $30 million/year into $300 million/year. Because a) at those numbers, the only material difference is the number; your lifestyle won't change appreciably, and b) if you actually cared about making a better product or making yourself better at doing a thing in the first place, that kind of extra money (or lack thereof) wouldn't be important enough to change that.
ben_w 10mo ago
To the main topic: I am so not surprised. I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness. As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?
- latexr 10mo ago
  > As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem? Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.
SunshineTheCat 10mo ago
Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.
- bondarchuk 10mo ago
  If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    haha, you seem to think laws a democratically created. we should all by now know that most laws are written by others that donate the most to the congress critters that just attach their names to them.
  - silisili 10mo ago
    I'm always baffled by this. The only exposure I have to video ads at all anymore are the 3 or so football games I might watch per year OTA. Each time, I'm always absolutely blown away by both the amount of and content of the ads and how maddening they are. I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.
  - esseph 10mo ago
    Everybody hates daylight savings time but we still have it. 54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant". (I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)
    - BenjiWiebe 10mo ago
      I hate time change but I love daylight savings time. I'll put up with the switch if that's the only way to get DST.
imiric 10mo ago
The tech ouroboros manifest.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
xthe 10mo ago
That’s a bit risky. When AI starts swapping proven ads, you often end up with more volume but lower quality lots of junk leads. If something is already working, replacing it automatically can hurt real results, not just the metrics.
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago
  But just think of how much money Meta could make by slopping fetish-bait over your brand and charging you for every click!
  - copx 10mo ago
    Don't give them ideas.
- haskellandrust 10mo ago
  Proven ads? The dirty not-so-secret is that proven ads don’t exist. That’s why these companies employ PHDs to think of new and interesting ways to modify your behavior and influence your future. This is just another step in that evolution
HawtAds 10mo ago
It's not just Facebook, the entire ads industry is heading in this direction. There's a seismic change going on right now.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  So instead of devs needing to retool their skills, the Don Drapers of the world will be ousted instead? I'm thinking I'm okay with this
ffuxlpff 10mo ago
We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.
- smallmancontrov 10mo ago
  Elsagate is back, and this time she's after boomer gold.
- atrus 10mo ago
  Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups, and higher retention) the more traditional and even player created ads. The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
  - lawlessone 10mo ago
    Could we(AI ads) be hitting this? "Supernormal Stimulus" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
    - hollerith 10mo ago
      Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli 200 years ago.
      - lawlessone 10mo ago
        I think you can add to that things like fast foods, snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts, sugars etc to keep people eating.
        hollerith 10mo ago
        And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.
EA-3167 10mo ago
I think that's nice! Now my ad-blocker and their ad-generator can have a loving relationship without me being involved. The circle is complete! Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.
chuckadams 10mo ago
> Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run. Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.
  - rchaud 10mo ago
    Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.
    - Terr_ 10mo ago
      Yeah, as much as some software updates need to be automatic for security reasons, others need to be opt-in because the publisher can't be trusted. Not just in the sense of downgrading the software, but also when the publisher—sometimes under new management—decides to add things that invade your privacy or are straight-up malware.
    - hapticmonkey 10mo ago
      It’s the third stage in the process. First the platform is good to users. Then it’s bad to users but good to business customers. Third, and finally, it’s bad to both users and business customers. Now it’s only the shareholders that are winning.
- x0x0 10mo ago
  We tried these AI-produced ads. They produced gibberish. Random mutations of our existing ads with nonsensical words and the desired actions just permutated.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jkuria 10mo ago
This is really annoying. They force the "Optimize Text Per Person" and it is really hard to turn off. If you accept even one "enhancement" they turn OTPP and there isn't a disable button. And then it spews garbage in some of the ads--copy that is full of non-sequiturs and first and second lines that are complete nonesense. They should be held to account.
- redsymbol 10mo ago
  Media buyer here (among other things), so I feel you. I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point, because Meta's generated text can in some cases mislead or flat-out lie about what is actually being sold. The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.
  - danaris 10mo ago
    > I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point ...not if the Republicans stay in office.
conradfr 10mo ago
An AI agent watching AI ads and buying groceries for you.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
naet 10mo ago
I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions. I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it. -- On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.
- __loam 10mo ago
  Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.
  - gedy 10mo ago
    I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.
- 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
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redsymbol 10mo ago
I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on. I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now. Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind: 1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them. The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled. This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active. The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive. It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns. These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world. That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen. Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
- algo_trader 10mo ago
  can you spare 5 minutes for a quick email/chat about bidding/campaigns? its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/ (I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on twitter
agentifysh 10mo ago
are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta is the best but is this backed up by real data? it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- eastbound 10mo ago
  Maybe Meta has older people with more spending power. That’s the lesson of Spinal Tap: Sometimes you don’t know what your success is caused by, and every rationalization makes you optimize the wrong knob (hence the “amp it up to 11” meme).
- redsymbol 10mo ago
  I have spent over $100k of my own money running ads on Meta, over $10k on Linkedin, and also significant amounts on Google (GDN/Youtube/keyword search) and X/Twitter. My experience: For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative. In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years. Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale). I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch. Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface. Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours. Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend. GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta. Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.
alex1138 10mo ago
I apologize for the somewhat low-effort comment but across the board Meta is the single most malicious tech company I can think of I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them
- nmfisher 10mo ago
  For what it’s worth, I unequivocally agree with you. But if you spent any time with the older generation over the holiday break, it’s immediately obvious why it makes no difference. They sit there and scroll Facebook and Instagram advertising slop for multiple hours literally every single day. Facebook will keep hoovering up cash until at least that generation dies off (and possibly the one after that too).
  - alex1138 10mo ago
    Oh sure but a) people don't realize the scandals or magnitude of them and b) they literally captured every network effect Myspace was a hot mess but they got everyone that was there at the start of the internet where if I'm on it, you join, because you're on it Alice joins and Bob then follows Facebook has rigged the game by forcing everyone there using very underhanded tactics and the internet is still young so they're able to succeed in doing so
lukev 10mo ago
Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored. There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn. This feels kind of like that.
- sfink 10mo ago
  iron crab porn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into-crabs/ https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into... http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/
  - yencabulator 10mo ago
    > http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ Ah, the site formerly known as ftp.warez.org.
garganzol 10mo ago
Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off. It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.
realitydrift 10mo ago
[flagged]

144 points by zdw 10mo ago

This is nothing, wait until Zuckerberg delivers those 15 virtual "friends" he promised & they start shilling for whoever is the highest bidder.

tehjoker 10mo ago

this might be a submarine advertisement. someone is pitching their startup near the bottom of the article

jasonlotito 10mo ago
Submarine? It says Advertising at the top.
- smallerize 10mo ago
  That's just the category of news this is. It doesn't mean it's an ad.
smallerize 10mo ago
I don't think so. It goes against their sponsored content policies https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts https://www.businessinsider.com/sponsor-posts Specifically, it should be labelled, and editorial staff are not involved in making it.

agumonkey 10mo ago

there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of something for 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole

atomic128 10mo ago
Poison Fountain https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/
- agumonkey 10mo ago
  interesting, i didn't know about this effort
design2203 10mo ago
Because there is an obsession re. Financial wealth as opposed to the creation of real wealth. The two are not the same. The connection between the two has seemingly been lost.
- neom 10mo ago
  Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes as they say. Hyper consumerism, status symbols, a fundamentally pack/tribal species? what could possibly go wrong?
- immibis 10mo ago
  The way around this, by the way, is to create some kind of alternative exchange system that only admits real-for-real exchange and makes hoarding money impossible.
  - danaris 10mo ago
    No; the way around this, as it always has been, is redistribution. I know it's considered a dirty word in many circles nowadays, but by far the most effective means we know of disincentivizing a singleminded focus on the accumulation of wealth is to make that number something you can't keep pushing up after a certain point. No human being will ever be genuinely discouraged from making a better product or making themselves better at doing something because they couldn't turn their (personal, not company) $30 million/year into $300 million/year. Because a) at those numbers, the only material difference is the number; your lifestyle won't change appreciably, and b) if you actually cared about making a better product or making yourself better at doing a thing in the first place, that kind of extra money (or lack thereof) wouldn't be important enough to change that.

ben_w 10mo ago

To the main topic: I am so not surprised. I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness. As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?

latexr 10mo ago
> As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem? Yes, Business Insider and (if I recall) Bloomberg (both shared on HN on occasion) both do that to me.

SunshineTheCat 10mo ago

Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.

bondarchuk 10mo ago
If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  haha, you seem to think laws a democratically created. we should all by now know that most laws are written by others that donate the most to the congress critters that just attach their names to them.
- silisili 10mo ago
  I'm always baffled by this. The only exposure I have to video ads at all anymore are the 3 or so football games I might watch per year OTA. Each time, I'm always absolutely blown away by both the amount of and content of the ads and how maddening they are. I always wonder if people who watch regularly are just used to it as part of life, like some weird advertising Stockholm syndrome.
- esseph 10mo ago
  Everybody hates daylight savings time but we still have it. 54% of people are creeped out by targeted ads, 79% of mobile and 73% of desktop users are "frustrated" by the current ad load, and 70% of customers across the board find digital advertising "annoying and unpleasant". (I have a self-held theory that roughly 30% of people are... interesting to say the least.)
  - BenjiWiebe 10mo ago
    I hate time change but I love daylight savings time. I'll put up with the switch if that's the only way to get DST.

imiric 10mo ago

The tech ouroboros manifest.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

xthe 10mo ago

That’s a bit risky. When AI starts swapping proven ads, you often end up with more volume but lower quality lots of junk leads. If something is already working, replacing it automatically can hurt real results, not just the metrics.

smallmancontrov 10mo ago
But just think of how much money Meta could make by slopping fetish-bait over your brand and charging you for every click!
- copx 10mo ago
  Don't give them ideas.
haskellandrust 10mo ago
Proven ads? The dirty not-so-secret is that proven ads don’t exist. That’s why these companies employ PHDs to think of new and interesting ways to modify your behavior and influence your future. This is just another step in that evolution

HawtAds 10mo ago

It's not just Facebook, the entire ads industry is heading in this direction. There's a seismic change going on right now.

dylan604 10mo ago
So instead of devs needing to retool their skills, the Don Drapers of the world will be ousted instead? I'm thinking I'm okay with this

ffuxlpff 10mo ago

We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.

smallmancontrov 10mo ago
Elsagate is back, and this time she's after boomer gold.
atrus 10mo ago
Honestly? They might. A game I play (Torn.com) started using AI and over dramatic ads, and they outperformed (higher signups, and higher retention) the more traditional and even player created ads. The owner expressed surprise and frustration over it, because it kinda sucks that's what works.
- lawlessone 10mo ago
  Could we(AI ads) be hitting this? "Supernormal Stimulus" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
  - hollerith 10mo ago
    Newspapers and cheap gin were already supernormal stimuli 200 years ago.
    - lawlessone 10mo ago
      I think you can add to that things like fast foods, snacks etc with carefully tuned levels of fats , salts, sugars etc to keep people eating.
      - hollerith 10mo ago
        And cheap paperback novels, movies, TV, pornography and video games. The amount of stimulation or positive reward available through these things with only a small effort and a small risk and a short waiting time are much greater than anything available in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness with a similar degree of effort, risk and waiting time.

EA-3167 10mo ago

I think that's nice! Now my ad-blocker and their ad-generator can have a loving relationship without me being involved. The circle is complete! Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.

chuckadams 10mo ago

> Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run. Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|

Terr_ 10mo ago
One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.
- rchaud 10mo ago
  Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.
  - Terr_ 10mo ago
    Yeah, as much as some software updates need to be automatic for security reasons, others need to be opt-in because the publisher can't be trusted. Not just in the sense of downgrading the software, but also when the publisher—sometimes under new management—decides to add things that invade your privacy or are straight-up malware.
  - hapticmonkey 10mo ago
    It’s the third stage in the process. First the platform is good to users. Then it’s bad to users but good to business customers. Third, and finally, it’s bad to both users and business customers. Now it’s only the shareholders that are winning.
x0x0 10mo ago
We tried these AI-produced ads. They produced gibberish. Random mutations of our existing ads with nonsensical words and the desired actions just permutated.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jkuria 10mo ago

This is really annoying. They force the "Optimize Text Per Person" and it is really hard to turn off. If you accept even one "enhancement" they turn OTPP and there isn't a disable button. And then it spews garbage in some of the ads--copy that is full of non-sequiturs and first and second lines that are complete nonesense. They should be held to account.

redsymbol 10mo ago
Media buyer here (among other things), so I feel you. I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point, because Meta's generated text can in some cases mislead or flat-out lie about what is actually being sold. The only defense is to have checklists and continually go over running campaigns to make sure everything is configured properly, which as you note is really hard to turn off. Very easy to miss a detail in ad manager's complex UI.
- danaris 10mo ago
  > I think it's possible the American FTC might start going after advertisers at some point ...not if the Republicans stay in office.

conradfr 10mo ago

An AI agent watching AI ads and buying groceries for you.

deleted 10mo ago

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naet 10mo ago

I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions. I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it. -- On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.

__loam 10mo ago
Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.
- gedy 10mo ago
  I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.
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redsymbol 10mo ago

I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on. I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now. Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind: 1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related media I won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them. The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled. This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active. The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive. It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns. These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world. That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen. Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.

algo_trader 10mo ago
can you spare 5 minutes for a quick email/chat about bidding/campaigns? its rare to find a technically proficient media buyer ;/ (I am not a FB employee or a lawyer.. ) I will send you a DM on twitter

agentifysh 10mo ago

are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta is the best but is this backed up by real data? it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.

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eastbound 10mo ago
Maybe Meta has older people with more spending power. That’s the lesson of Spinal Tap: Sometimes you don’t know what your success is caused by, and every rationalization makes you optimize the wrong knob (hence the “amp it up to 11” meme).
redsymbol 10mo ago
I have spent over $100k of my own money running ads on Meta, over $10k on Linkedin, and also significant amounts on Google (GDN/Youtube/keyword search) and X/Twitter. My experience: For most ad campaign types, YES, Meta works far better than any alternative. In my view, this is because its underlying machine-learning algorithms are better. Not the generative AI mentioned in the article, but the core ML-based learning strategy that every modern ad platform has been based on for over a decade now, allowing it to learn to find buyers for whatever you are selling. Meta is just better at that than anyone else - far better. And has been for years. Linkedin is quite interesting and can reach audiences no other ad platform can. The problem with LI is that it is tremendously expensive. Think $50-200 per qualified lead, so it only makes sense for very high ticket offers. I've never been able to make LI ads work for lowticket offers (i.e. under $500 gross margin per sale). I have attempted to run ads on X/twitter several times in the past 5 years, and each time gave up because of how terribly it performed. Literally zero sales from the ad spend, using the exact same ads which worked great on Meta. X is kind of infamous among media buyers for how bad it is. But I haven't tried it in over 8 months, so maybe it has gotten better now. Grok/xAI is quite good, so I am not sure why they haven't made the X ad platform a priority. If they did, I bet they could eat Meta's lunch. Google is really 3 ad platforms: Youtube, Google Display Network (GDN), and keyword search. These are all radically different in many dimensions; the only thing they have in common is that Google lets you set them all up through the same web interface. Mostly I run ads selling mid to high-ticket stuff to sophisticated buyers, and I think most of those people have Youtube Premium, which makes YT ad-free. So I haven't tried running ads on Youtube much. My media buyer colleagues who are into it are mostly selling mass-market offers that most people on HN would consider kind of scummy. They tell me it can work well, but requires a lot of ad spend over weeks to start working. In contrast, I can often get a Meta ad campaign profitable within 48 hours. Keyword search works great, but only for "bottom of funnel" buyers (i.e. people who are actively looking for a solution they can pay for right now). There are only so many of those, so generally you cannot scale up ad spend (and thus absolute profit) very high. In contrast, Meta can create new "top of funnel" buyers, which is a larger audience by many orders of magnitude, which allows you to ramp up some Meta campaigns to a very high level of profitable ad spend. GDN has been tricky for me. I think it has a lot of potential, but it has a very different model, and so far I have not been able to make it profitable for my offers. It certainly seems easier to set up a successful campaign with Meta. Short answer to your question: Yes, even with the things the article is justifiably griping about, Meta is just way, way better than any alternative right now.

alex1138 10mo ago

I apologize for the somewhat low-effort comment but across the board Meta is the single most malicious tech company I can think of I'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them

nmfisher 10mo ago
For what it’s worth, I unequivocally agree with you. But if you spent any time with the older generation over the holiday break, it’s immediately obvious why it makes no difference. They sit there and scroll Facebook and Instagram advertising slop for multiple hours literally every single day. Facebook will keep hoovering up cash until at least that generation dies off (and possibly the one after that too).
- alex1138 10mo ago
  Oh sure but a) people don't realize the scandals or magnitude of them and b) they literally captured every network effect Myspace was a hot mess but they got everyone that was there at the start of the internet where if I'm on it, you join, because you're on it Alice joins and Bob then follows Facebook has rigged the game by forcing everyone there using very underhanded tactics and the internet is still young so they're able to succeed in doing so

lukev 10mo ago

Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored. There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn. This feels kind of like that.

sfink 10mo ago
iron crab porn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into-crabs/ https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into... http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/
- yencabulator 10mo ago
  > http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/ Ah, the site formerly known as ftp.warez.org.

garganzol 10mo ago

Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off. It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.

realitydrift 10mo ago

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