Meta’s creator-led ads hit $15 billion run rate, surging 97% YoY: CFO Susan Li

Meta's drive into creator-brand partnerships is yielding substantial commercial returns, with its creator-focused advertising product now crossing a $15 billion annual revenue run rate. During the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Susan Li highlighted the rapid commercial expansion of these collaborative formats. "We're also expanding the opportunity at the intersection of creators and advertising," Li stated. "Partnership Ads, which allow advertisers to run ads with creators, brands and other businesses, continued to scale rapidly in Q3. Our partnership ads product grew over 97% year-over-year and surpassed $15 billion in annual revenue run-rate".

Streamlining Creator Discovery

To further capitalise on this monetisation momentum, the tech giant has restructured its infrastructure for creator discovery. Li explained that the company has formalised a central marketplace to streamline how brands and creators connect. "In Q3, we also completed the global rollout of Creator Marketing Hub to all advertisers, bringing creator discovery, content organization and partnership ad activation into one place, with more than 10 million creators now discoverable," Li noted.

Conversational AI is being integrated directly into this workflow to reduce friction for media buyers. "We are integrating Meta AI Business Assistant into the Hub so advertisers can conversationally search for creators, identify content to use in partnership ads and get guidance across their creator marketing workflows," Li added.

AI Agents and Core Business Acceleration

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg underscored how these creator and advertising tools are being structurally reinforced by the company's broader push into generative AI and autonomous business agents. Speaking on the potential of these models to empower independent creators and smaller enterprises to scale their operations, Zuckerberg observed, "What we see is a lot of people are actually using Muse today to help run especially small businesses. And we think that there's both an opportunity to help create an agent that people use to really enable them to automate and do a lot of the parts of spinning up a small business that are just kind of difficult and time consuming but aren't the core thing that a person is trying to do".

Zuckerberg also emphasised that the underlying architecture driving content recommendation is continuously evolving to yield higher returns. "Beyond serving other businesses, we have not yet found the limit of how effectively we can apply compute to accelerating our own core business," he stated. "We have implemented an eval with Muse Wonder to improve how effectively it can autonomously improve our recommendations and ads systems".

These creator monetisation milestones arrive as Meta reports a robust third quarter overall, with Family of Apps ad revenue reaching $63.1 billion, representing a 26% increase year-over-year. Algorithmic improvements are also favouring creators by pushing fresher content; nearly 45% of recommended Instagram Reels are now less than one day old, up over 11 percentage points from the previous quarter.