Profit From Pain 💰👨‍💻

👀 TLDR

In this week’s What’s Appening, we cover Reuters’ explosive report that claims Meta is making billions of dollars each year from advertisers running blatant scams. What’s more, the report claims Meta is well aware of the issue and seems reluctant to fix it. We also have news on how bad sales of the iPhone Air are, look at the race for AI companies to be profitable, Wikipedia’s plea to stop AI web crawlers scraping its data,, highlight an app that can help you learn just about anything, and much more!

🎬 Our Top Take

🤑🥷 Meta – Reuters Report Alleges Billions Made from Scam Ads

Every now and again, we come across a story that leaves us shocked that it’s not getting wall-to-wall news coverage. In this case, it’s a report from Reuters on Meta this week – based on leaked internal documents and memos – that show how much Meta has made from scam adverts and how, effectively, it’s built into the company's business model. Reuters claims that 10% of Meta’s global revenues in 2024 came from adverts that were for blatant scams or banned goods. That’s around $16 billion and change.  The docs also show that Meta is both aware of the problem and seemingly willful to ignore it: Meta allowed up to 500 strikes for high-value scamming accounts, i.e., those paying a premium to Meta to advertise, before taking any action. Internally, the memos show that collectively users see 15 billion scam adverts per day on Meta’s platforms, alongside the organic scams (22 billion estimated) that aren’t actually paying directly. The final kick in the teeth was that the report claims that Meta’s algorithms effectively target users more likely to click on scam advertisements. For balance, we should say that Meta played down some of the figures mentioned in the report (but certainly didn’t deny the allegations), but we’d invite you to read the original Reuters article here, as it is really mind-blowing, as well as highly infuriating. #MetaProblem Read more here.

📲 App of the Week: Cosmo

Cosmo from CodeSignal is an AI-powered app that basically takes the microlearning model espoused by brands like Duolingo and applies it to just about everything. The premise is simple: take a complex skill – computer coding, financial trading, social media marketing – and learn about it for a few minutes each day, breaking everything down to bite-sized chunks and building your repository of knowledge. It is, again, like language-learning apps, free to download, but they push subscriptions to unlock the best features. Try it for iOS here and Android here.

🧐 Stat of the Week: $78B Loss

📈📉 AI – Anthropic Is Leading the Race to Make a Profit

It’s a theme that we’ve touched on now and then, and one that it is really starting to worry economists – when will AI be profitable? Well, there are internal forecasts from AI companies to give us a clue. OpenAI, for instance, expects to have a profitable year in 2030 (we’d say that ‘expects’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence). Anthropic, though, is a little earlier, believing it can be profitable by 2028. For context, OpenAI expects to lose about $78 billion in that year. Surreal figures. #AIProfits Read more here.

🗞️ Other Stories

📍 Meanwhile at 3Advance

Big news from one of our longtime partners, Pulse of Perseverance (P3), their national campaign is officially underway, and it’s incredible. The new brand film highlights P3’s mission: helping students build the connections that change everything. We’re so proud to be part of P3’s journey as their app – and their impact – reach an even bigger audience. Watch the film here: