Meta's Creator Ads Hit a $15 Billion Run Rate, Up $5 Billion Since April. Creators Get Only What They Negotiate.

Meta's ad product built on creators now brings in more than $15 billion a year, and it is growing faster than any other figure the company gave investors this week.

On Meta's third-quarter earnings call on 21 October, chief financial officer Susan Li said partnership ads "grew over 97% year over year and surpassed $15 billion in annual revenue run rate." Partnership ads let advertisers run ads with creators, brands and other businesses. On the first-quarter call on 29 April, Li put the run rate at $10 billion. That is about $5 billion added in two quarters, as Luis Rijo of PPC Land pointed out in his write-up of the call.

How big $15 billion is

A run rate takes recent revenue and projects it over a full year. It is not a line in Meta's accounts, and Meta does not report partnership ads separately. Anuja Jain at Storyboard18 noted that the company gave no quarterly figure and no split by platform or market.

The figure still gives a sense of scale. Li said Family of Apps ad revenue was $63.1 billion in the quarter. A $15 billion run rate works out to about $3.75 billion a quarter, which is about 6% of that total. Growth of more than 97% also means the run rate a year ago was below $8 billion.

For context, the IAB estimated that US creator ad spend would reach $37 billion in 2025 and $44 billion in 2026. That number counts direct deals, paid amplification and planned placements next to creators, all in the US only. Meta's number is global and counts only its own ad revenue, so the two can't be compared directly. Even so, a single ad format on one company's apps is now in the same range as the IAB's whole-market estimate.

Where the money goes

The $15 billion is money brands paid Meta. PPC Land's explainer on the format describes the deal this way: brand and creator first agree a fee, a scope and a term. Then "the brand pays Meta for the media. The creator's fee is settled separately and Meta takes no part in it."

So the growth doesn't raise creator pay by itself. A creator is paid whatever their usage-rights contract says, whether a brand puts $500 or $500,000 behind their face.

Meta's own help page for creators shows how little friction there is. For new branded content, the "Allow brand partner to boost" toggle switches on automatically for 28 days after the creator's last branded post, so creators "don't have to approve every post, story or reel manually." Advertisers can also make partnership ads from existing content that never shows up on the creator's profile.

The pricing tension is not new. PPC Land cited a January item in Mike Shields' Next in Media newsletter. In it, Agentio founder Arthur Leopold said buyers want to spend a few hundred dollars testing a creator video while creators quote thousands. "That model will never work," he said.

The buying gets automated

Meta is now making creators easier to buy. Li said the Creator Marketing Hub finished rolling out to all advertisers in the quarter, with "more than 10 million creators now discoverable." Meta is building its AI Business Assistant into the hub so advertisers can "conversationally search for creators" and choose content to turn into ads. When Meta announced the hub at Cannes in June, it described a pre-permissioned system: creators who opt in can have their content run as ads without approving each one, PPC Land reported.

For creators, this changes what to negotiate. If the media spend is growing 97% a year and none of it reaches you, the money is in the licence terms: how long it lasts, spend caps, whether the brand gets account-level access, and whether you can approve ads made in your name.