3 advertising stats from Meta’s record holiday ‘25 period

Meta Platforms grew ads revenue 24% yr over yr to $58.1 billion in Q4, a period that saw record holiday advertising demand and the social media giant continuing to fine-tune its artificial intelligence bets. Executives positioned 2026 as a moment of organizational transformation driven by AI — including the “flattening” of some teams — after years of hype.

“We are actually seeing a significant AI acceleration,” said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in prepared remarks. “I expect 2026 to be a yr where this wave accelerates even further on several fronts.

Overall ad impressions at Meta rose 18% YoY for the quarter ended Dec. 31 while the common price per ad ticked up 6%, a mirrored image of upper demand, in accordance with an earnings statement. 

Discussing his long-term AI vision, Zuckerberg illustrated potential use cases like writing a prompt to create a customized video game through Meta’s Horizon Worlds platform that may then be shared inside a user’s social network. The near term will see the corporate continuing to double down on what’s already working on the business front while the specifics of more complex AI applications are ironed out.

“We are focused on things beyond ads. I feel the numbers make it in order that for the subsequent couple of years, ads are going to be, by far, crucial driver of growth in our business,” said Zuckerberg on a call discussing the outcomes with investors. “All these items, even in the event that they scale in a short time, are going to take a while to be meaningful at the dimensions of what the ads business is.”

On the back end, Meta is leveraging AI to enhance its ads rating and learning models that analyze user behavior. In Q4, the corporate doubled the variety of graphics processing units dedicated to training its Generative Ads Recommendation Model and made other tweaks that, taken together, resulted in a 3% lift in clicks on Facebook and a 1% boost to conversions on Instagram, CFO Susan Li said. 

Advertisers are also experimenting more with Meta’s generative AI tools for campaign creation. The company’s video generator offerings reached a combined revenue run rate of $10 billion during Q4. Quarter-over-quarter, the speed of growth for these features outpaced overall increases in ads revenue by nearly 3 times, in accordance with Li.  Looking ahead, Meta is attempting to tie AI closer to transactions through shopping agents that may offer more personalized recommendations to users. 

“Our ads today help businesses find just the best very specific people who find themselves curious about their products,” said Zuckerberg. “New agentic shopping tools will allow people to search out just the best, very specific set of products from the companies in our catalogue.”

While AI stays a posh and resource-intensive investment, the corporate is looking into leaner ways of working that could be enabled by AI-native tools. Meta last yr saw some key AI leaders depart while recent media reports have indicated its newer AI divisions have butted heads with the remaining of the corporate.  

“We’re beginning to see projects that used to require big teams now be completed by a single very talented person,” said Zuckerberg.

While AI is improving the efficiency of Meta advertising, the technology continues to come back with a steep price tag: Capital expenditures reached $22.14 billion in Q4 and $72.22 billion for the complete yr. That pace of spending is predicted to hurry up significantly, with the Facebook and Instagram owner forecasting 2026 capex will land within the range of $115 billion and $135 billion, the lion’s share of which can be dedicated to AI development.