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Meta's fight for attention has its own root threat; these pages are about the rivals competing for the advertising dollar, two of whom cannot be beaten by building a better feed.
Meta's competitive position is usually discussed as a fight for attention, and that fight — principally with TikTok — already has its own root threat on this company. These pages are about the other three kinds of rival, the ones competing for advertising dollars rather than for minutes.
Google is the other half of a duopoly that takes most of the world's digital advertising, and the two barely meet: Google sells intent, Meta sells interruption, and an advertiser typically buys both. Amazon is the more dangerous kind of rival, because it sells advertising at the point of purchase with closed-loop attribution Meta cannot match, and it has built that into a business worth more than $70 billion a year. Apple is not a competitor for users at all — it is the landlord of the road Meta's product travels on, and it used that position to take an estimated $10 billion of Meta's revenue with a single privacy setting. And the AI assistants are the first genuinely new place attention has gone in a decade.
What the last two have in common is that neither is beaten by building a better feed. Meta's usual competitive answer — copy the format, deploy it to billions of users, out-monetise the originator — works against products. It does not work against a platform owner changing the rules, or against a category that does not involve a feed.
The number that tests all of it is average price per ad, which rose 9% in 20251 alongside 12% more impressions. Pricing that keeps rising means advertisers still find Meta's auction the best available; it falling while impressions grow would mean the competition has finally reached the money.
None of these rivalries moved much. The Google split held, Apple has not repeated App Tracking Transparency, and the assistants have so far proved additive rather than substitutive. Amazon's advertising business kept growing faster than Meta's, which is the one genuine erosion — but Meta still raised average ad prices 9% while delivering 12% more impressions, which is not what competitive pressure looks like.
More inventory and higher prices simultaneously is only possible when advertiser demand grows faster than supply — which is what competitive pressure would remove first. Watch price per ad rather than revenue: revenue can grow on impressions alone, but rising prices mean advertisers are competing for Meta's auction.
Source: Meta Form 10-K, FY2025 ↗- ReportedMeta's average price per ad rose 9% in 2025 while ad impressions delivered rose 12%.Meta Form 10-K, FY2025 — Family daily active people 3.58 billion on average for December 2025 (+7%); ad impressions delivered across the Family of Apps increased 12% year over year in 2025; average price per ad increased 9%; total revenue $200,966M, with revenue disaggregated by customer address of United States and Canada $78,866M, Europe $46,569M, Asia-Pacific $53,817M and Rest of World $21,714M; United States revenue $74.78 billion — FY2025 (ended December 31, 2025) · publ. January 29, 2026 · source ↗