Meta is well-positioned to benefit from generative AI in digital advertising and content, argues Ben Thompson of Stratechery. Meta’s massive scale, troves of user data, and advanced ad infrastructure enable the company to generate unlimited variations of highly targeted ads and measure their effectiveness, likely boosting ad revenue and margins in the short term.
In the medium term, Meta plans to insert AI-generated content directly into users’ feeds, which could prove more engaging than user-generated content. Eventually, ads may become indistinguishable from content as every image becomes potential ad inventory. Longer-term, AI will enable frictionless, generative user interfaces in AR and create rich virtual worlds in VR at low cost, benefiting Meta’s Quest headsets and metaverse vision.