Meta’s advertising revenue rose 22% to $196.2 billion in fiscal 2025 (year to 31 December 2025), about 98% of its $201.0 billion total, according to its 10-K. Advertising is sold across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp; Meta does not report Facebook’s ad revenue on its own. Average revenue per person across its apps rose 15% to $57.03.
How we source: the figures in the boxes and charts on this page come from Meta’s own annual filing, with the period stated next to each number. Data checked 17 October 2026. The original article below may quote earlier periods. Our methodology.
Key figures ยท fiscal 2025 (year to 31 December 2025)
Facebook generated $131.95 billion in revenue in 2023, compared to $113,64 billion in 2022, $115.6 billion in 2021, and nearly $85 billion in 2020.
Meta Revenue Breakdown
2022
%
Advertising
$113.64B
97.5%
Other revenue (payments and fees)
$809MM
0.7%
Reality Labs (primarily sales of Oculus, now called Meta Quest)
$2.16B
1.9%
Total
$116.6B
FourWeekMBA Intelligence Analysis
In 2022, advertising revenues represented 97.5% of the total revenues for Facebook (now Meta), with $113.64 billion in revenues, representing a slowdown compared to $115.65 in revenues for 2021.
Other revenues, comparing payments and fees, were $808 million in 2022, or 0.7% of the total revenues.
While Reality Labs (primarily sales of Oculus, rebranded as Meta Quest) amounted to $2.16 billion, or 1.9% of the total revenues, in 2022.
The digital advertising industry has become a multi-billion industry dominated by a few key tech players. The industry’s advertising dollars are also fragmented across several small players and publishers across the web. Most of it is consolidated within brands like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Bing, Twitter, TikTok, which is growing very quickly, and Pinterest.
Three core changes are impacting and reshaping the whole digital advertising industry:
The cookie has represented the enabler of the digital advertising industry, enabling tech companies to track the user journey across several platforms, thus making it possible to build the whole attribution machine.
Indeed, without attribution (the ability to say how a lead was generated), there would not be a digital advertising industry in the first place.
Yet, the cookie is getting retired. Google has planned the retirement of the cookie to its Chrome browser, thus determining the end of an era.
This means Apple will ask users whether they want to be tracked.
As you can imagine, this is already having a massive impact on Facebook’s businessmodel, which had to rebrand as Meta and invest billions into VR.
Privacy from regulation
Regulators are also pushing for more and more privacy within various platforms.
This makes it much harder to track users and thus makes the whole digital advertising machine lose efficacy.
While in 2021, Google and Facebook still peaked in terms of revenues.
By 2022, with a changed market context, Facebook’s revenues would be slashed for the first time, forcing the company into mass layoffs!
The year of efficiency
As the company was affected by a massive slowdown for the first time in its history, it started to rethink its efforts in the future.
First, by refocusing its efforts from the Metaverse to Generative AI.
Indeed, in the last couple of years, the Metevarse has costFacebook a massive amount of money, which was not justified as a return.
Indeed, in 2022, for some context, Reality Labs (the segment related to the Metaverse) generated $1.43 billion in revenue while posting an almost ten billion dollars loss!
As of September 2022, Facebook, rebranded as Meta, is a profitable company, generating $18.54B in net profits. Yet, if we look at its Reality Labs segment, which is in charge of building the Metaverse, it recorded a net loss of $9.44 billion in the first nine months of 2022.
As announced by Meta, the year of efficiency moves along a few key pillars:
Flatter is better
Leaner is better
Keep technology the main thing
Invest in tools to get more efficient
In-person time to build relationships and get more done
Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes
Year Founded
February 2004, Cambridge, MA
Year of IPO
May 18, 2012
IPO Price
$38.00
Market Cap at IPO
$104 Billion
Total Revenues at IPO
$3.7 Billion by 2011, prior to the IPO
Total Revenues in 2022
$116.6B
Changed name
Meta, in October 2021
Employees
71,970 employees globally, as of December 31, 2021
Revenues per Employee
$1,642,693.97
Who owns Meta?
Mark Zuckerberg is the primary individual shareholder, with 81.7% of Class B shares, and 52.9% of the total voting power
Founded in February 2004, in Cambridge, MA, by Mark Zuckerberg, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes, Facebook IPOed on May 18, 2012, at a price of $38 per share, and a market cap of $104 billion and total revenues for $3.7 billion in 2011, prior to the IPO. In 2021, Facebook generated over $117 billion in revenues, and it changed its name in October 2021, to Meta. With 71,970 employees, Meta generated $1,642,694 per employee. Mark Zuckerberg is the primary individual shareholder, with 81.7% of Class B shares and 52.9% of the total voting power.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
Scroll to Top
Discover more from FourWeekMBA
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
