Meta's $75 Billion AI Ad Engine Is Making Trust the Scarce Asset
Meta's second-quarter numbers show how fast the machine is running. Revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion, ad impressions grew 14% and the average price per ad rose 12%, according to the company's Q2 2026 results. Third-quarter revenue guidance is $61 billion to $64 billion.
"Our AI-powered Advantage+ end-to-end solutions continued to grow, reaching over $75 billion in annual revenue run-rate this quarter," CFO Susan Li said on the earnings call. She said adoption of Meta's image-generation tools, which let advertisers turn existing content into new ad variations, more than doubled in the quarter.
Meta shares closed at $728.08 on Oct. 2, up about 10% this year, against a 52-week range of $520.26 to $779.82. The cost side is the debate: 2026 capital spending guidance is $130 billion to $145 billion.
More ads, less belief
Consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated ad content fell from 60% in 2023 to 26% in 2025, according to Sonata Insights research reported by Beet.TV.
Rhys McKay, who ran a blockchain marketing firm from 2020 to 2025, says it spent $30 million on influencer and guerrilla campaigns before conversions fell off.
"In 2025, there was one influencer who we paid $30,000 to promote an exchange. And he got one sign up," McKay said in an interview. He blames saturation: "Influencers have already promoted 100 plus brands in some cases where if you're the 101st brand in queue, the audience is already saturated."
US creator ad spend still reached $37 billion in 2025, up 26%, per the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which found 95% of brands have concerns about AI in creator marketing.
The regulated end: Hims & Hers
Hims & Hers shows what is at stake for an advertiser in a regulated category. Second-quarter revenue rose 38% to $753.2 million and subscribers reached 2.89 million, but the company posted an $86.3 million net loss, per its quarterly filing. Marketing cost $262.2 million, or 34.8% of revenue, down from 40% a year earlier.
The filing also lists FDA warning letters from September 2025 over website claims about compounded semaglutide. On July 29 the FTC, Utah and Los Angeles County sued the company under the FTC Act and the federal online subscription law, and Hims has accrued about $60 million for the matter. Hims called the suit "not enforcement grounded in consumer protection; it is an effort to generate headlines at our expense." Hims shares closed at $29 on Oct. 2, down about 11% this year.
"Content is cheap now. Trust isn't," said Gabriele Muratori, marketing strategist & founder of creator-marketing platform Roster, which says more than 200 brands have run campaigns through it and tracks how each video performs for health, pet and beauty brands. "In regulated categories, every claim in that video has to be safe to run." He added: "We use AI to replace the human in data analysis, not the human in front of the camera."
Muratori has written for The Next Web on why brands are pulling budgets from traditional influencer deals. Roster is private and says it has passed $400,000 in annual recurring revenue, a figure it gave Adnkronos.
Why Meta still wins
Creator content still needs distribution, and the winners tend to get boosted as paid ads. Daniel Bitton, who runs the Content Rewards clipping marketplace with Whop, says brands pay about $1 per thousand views there, against $40 to $80 on paid social. "If you go and spend a million dollars on content rewards, you're going to get a ton of viral pieces of content that you can now use to run as paid ads on those platforms," he said in an interview.
The risk for Meta is the regulated end. Health brands like Hims carry big marketing budgets, and regulators are now policing what those ads claim.
What to watch: Meta's third-quarter guide of $61 billion to $64 billion, and Hims' full-year guide of $3.1 billion to $3.3 billion.
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