Meta makes 98% of its money from ads. That is why the feed never ends

You opened the app to check one thing. Forty minutes later you are still scrolling, and you could not say why.

Nothing went wrong. The app did what it is paid to do. Meta’s latest annual report says it makes “substantially all” of its revenue from advertising: $196 billion of $201 billion last year. Marketers pay by the impression or the click, and both need your time.¹

Time spent is what it sells

The same report lists what could hurt that revenue. One item: “decreases in user engagement, including time spent on our products”. Further down it admits that when it changes its feed “to improve the user experience”, those changes have cut time spent, “which could adversely affect our financial results”.¹

A better experience for you has cost them money before, and they say so in writing.

A feed with an end would cost money

An edition ends. A stream does not. That is not an accident of design. It is the design.

Meta’s own experiments show how it works, as a judge described them last year. Facebook tried showing some people a fifth more posts from friends, and others a fifth fewer. Either way, time spent “was virtually unchanged”. Then Instagram tested Reels, the endless videos from strangers, and the people who got them spent almost 50% more time in the app. The head of Instagram called it “insane”.²

A company paid per impression keeps the version that keeps you. The friends’ posts did not move the number. The bottomless videos did.

One caveat. An annual report and a competition case show an incentive, not what the app does to you. Neither proves harm. They show, in Meta’s own words, which way the pressure points.

When you pay, the product can let you go

Turn the arithmetic around. A group letter that costs a few euros a month earns the same whether you read it in two minutes or twenty. It has no reason to add a video, a nudge or a scroll with no bottom. It exists only as long as your group thinks it is worth it.

That is why who pays is one of the six things we check before a product is listed here.

Try this

Before you open an app, ask one question: who pays for this? If the answer is advertisers, your time is the thing being sold.

Every product in the directory states its price and who pays, in the Pricing row on its card. Pick one for the people you actually want to hear from, and let the feed go. We make one of them, DearAll, and it is marked as ours.