Meta and Google already own a huge slice of the online advertising industry. They want more

Don Marti is a strategist in web ecosystem and open source business issues. He is an invited expert for the Privacy Working Group of the World Wide Web Consortium and has written or edited for several internet-related publications. 

If you think news has it tough, you might be able to cheer up a little by checking in on advertising, where things are a lot worse. A Harris Poll survey at an Association of National Advertisers conference found the top advice for young people with an interest in the field was to “pursue an electrician career” instead. While AI job loss fears are still hypothetical for most occupations, the Big Tech companies are already pretty far along on squeezing jobs — and smaller companies — out of advertising. Former Meta exec Rob Leathern explains:

The advantage is the whole factory: systems that identify users and extract features in milliseconds; multi-stage ranking models that combine different types of predictions; experiment platforms that measure long-term effects across thousands of overlapping tests; attribution systems that connect ads to purchases days or weeks later; and inference engines that serve predictions from massive databases cached across data centers.

The war on the advertising industry 

Today’s surveillance advertising business is integrated and consolidated. If the industry covered in the Wall Street Journal’s “What They Know” series in 2012 is an old desktop PC full of add-on cards, today’s surveillance ad business is a MacBook Air with custom unified chips for everything. And like Apple building its own parts, Big Tech has already declared war on the advertising industry. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview:

In general, we’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.

Myles Younger suggests that Zuckerberg’s vision of “AI” advertising could even grow to capture the money that now goes to media, sales, and customer service. The advertising agency business is already hollowing out. WPP, owner of famous agency brands including Ogilvy, is down from 200,000 employees to fewer than 90,000. The top six agency holding companies have gone from almost half of U.S. ad spend in 2019 to 28% in 2024. That training program for becoming a licensed electrician is looking better and better.

The role of adtech

Independent adtech is also being squeezed. Antitrust cases might end up compensating some companies’ shareholders for anticompetitive tricks that Big Tech did on their way up, but even without nefarious oligopoly-building, auction markets tend to consolidate where more buyers and sellers can meet each other. We’ll remember the mess of adtech companies the way we remember all the 8-bit PCs of the 1980s, the Unix variants of the 1990s, and online meeting systems of the 2000s.

But that doesn’t mean everyone in adtech has to either retire or go work for Meta or Google. The “tech” part of adtech is low-latency, low-overhead markets at Internet scale. With the need for energy and cloud computing markets, product telemetry, and other applications, the adtech business has more opportunities outside advertising than inside. Forward-thinking adtech people realize this, and an IAB Tech Lab working group on licensing content for AI training has been “skewed heavily toward adtech representation.” If a fair market for AI training rights does emerge, the kinds of fast, flexible trading infrastructure that adtech can operate will be needed. If the organization that started as the “New England Society for the Suppression of Vice” in 1878 can pivot to “Community Resources for Justice” then adtech companies should have no trouble.

But however bad agencies and adtech have it, advertisers have it worse, because ultimately the brand and their customers split the ever-growing costs of Big Tech. Andrew Tindall, writing for The Drum, points out the problem from the brand point of view. We’ve never spent more on advertising. It’s never done less for us. The measurable return on investment for Meta advertising is trending downward. Sarah LaFleur, founder of the apparel retailer M.M.LaFleur, saw customer acquisition costs on Facebook go from $13 in 2013 or 2014 to $250 today.  Sam Tomlinson, an executive vice president at search-focused marketing agency Warschawski, told Catherine Perloff of The Information that his clients are spending more money to reach the same number of customers, and “it’s not like you’ve got this wonderful assortment of good alternatives.” When advertisers look for opportunities not tied to the Meta sites and apps,  Google’s monopoly position imposes a “Google Tax” on everything.

When Google and Meta have all the ad money

For Big Tech, the growth in revenue and the decline in results aren’t optional. On average, the total price of products and services sold is going to grow as fast as the economy does (that’s what metrics like GDP try to measure) and that goes up at single-digit percentage rates if we’re lucky. Meanwhile, investors expect double-digit annual growth rates from Meta and Google, which puts them in a squeeze. Let’s take a look at the money.

• Google advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2025: $74.2 billion
• Meta advertising revenue for the same period: $50.1 billion 
• Add together, multiply by four to get an annualized number: $497.1 billion 

Meanwhile, the total advertising business, worldwide, is about a trillion dollars, and grows about as fast as the economy does. If you plot it out you get five or six years until Meta and Google have all the ad money. They’re not just dominant in their market, but still expected to grow faster than the market does, and the only way that can happen is to keep increasing their own piece of the action from every sale. That means a lot of pressure to cut corners, which helps explain the recent news that Meta estimates it is earning 10% of ad revenue from fraudulent and banned ads, the FBI advising people to “use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches” and Big Tech even trying to get a fraud-friendly attribution tracking system into web browsers as a standardized feature. The impact of fraudulent ads on Meta apps and in Google Search is bigger than the raw percentage of revenue that comes from fraud operators. Because the internal ad placement systems are run as auctions, the fraudulent advertisers drive up the prices paid by the legit advertisers. It would be a mistake to pin all the blame for Big Tech’s pivot to crime on excess optimism about the readiness of AI anti-fraud tools, pressure to cut staff in high-touch areas like fraud-fighting in order to spend more on hotter areas, and on dogmatic union-busting. Although all three of those probably play some part, even without them Big Tech is trying to get growth-stock-like gains in a slow-growing market they already dominate.

In a possible future with more honest online advertising, much of the money that people lose to scams today would end up being spent with legitimate businesses. And those businesses would have lower customer acquisition costs because they wouldn’t be fighting scam ads for eyeballs in a complicated auction market. Everyone outside of Big Tech would win. Unless the economy as a whole starts growing really fast, that lower-risk, higher-trust future will be the only viable one for legit companies.Next: What does a post-surveillance brand look like?

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Cite this article

Marti, Don  (2025, Nov. 24). Big Tech is squeezing advertising jobs and companies. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/big-tech-is-squeezing-advertising-jobs-and-companies/