Consent Without Paying: Alternatives to Meta’s Surveillance Advertising Models

Since its first advertising product launched in 2004, Meta has relied on revenue from advertising to support its business. In 2024, 98% of Meta’s $165bn of revenue came from advertising. From that revenue Meta generated nearly $70bn of profit.

While this advertising revenue means that individuals and businesses can use Meta’s social media and messaging products for free, they pay in other ways.

The behavioural advertising that Meta uses is fraught with problems. In March 2025, Meta settled a four-year court case with human rights campaigner Tanya O’Carroll, who had taken legal action to force the social media giant to stop collecting and processing her personal data for advertising purposes.

But advertisers and publishers also pay, and not just for the cost of advertising. Meta dominates the social media advertising market. Organisations who wish to advertise on social media have little choice but to use it yet the advertising products that organisations use also cause significant issues for them.

These issues include: a lack of control over customer relationships; an inability to understand advertising effectiveness; data about advertisers and publishers being used against their interests; lack of competition; and an unfair distribution of revenues. Meta’s profits have averaged 33.4% of their advertising revenues over the last five years.

Regulators around the world have investigated these issues but little action has been taken so far. As well as Meta’s lobbying power, there are concerns that breaking Meta’s advertising business model could break services used by billions of people and millions of businesses.

In 2020, the UK’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), found that there was a lack of innovation in the online advertising industry.

Instead of innovating and exploring alternative advertising models, Meta focussed on consent or pay, which leaves its existing behavioural advertising products unchanged. As such, it creates the same harms for people and, if laws and regulations are actively enforced, is likely to be illegal.

This report outlines alternatives to behavioural advertising that Meta has not explored, for example: contextual advertising; consent or pay that is not based on behavioural advertising; and the ability to subscribe to advertisers.

Out of these three, contextual advertising appears to be the model that is most likely to reduce harm and provide increased benefits for individuals, advertisers and publishers.

It would retain a viable business model for Meta that can support the social media products that billions of people and businesses use. It could even reduce costs and make Meta a more profitable business.

If Meta was to re-embrace the product innovation that led it to build its core social media services, which are used by billions of people, then it could probably discover other alternatives too.

But, if it does not, then regulators and courts should act with confidence that Meta does have viable alternatives to behavioural advertising and can reduce harms to individuals and businesses by changing their business model.