They didn’t? Metas revenue was down year over year for the latest quarter, whereas googles grew. Net income for the same quarter was down 55% for meta, as compared to down 34% for google (the headline of the featured article you are commenting on).

As a small startup founder, Facebook ads are easier and work way better than Google ads.

So much so that I’ve wondered how on Earth Google gets any business; even Reddit ads are easier to set up and work better.

Facebook ads are still expensive mind you.

Meta started getting beat up about a quarter before Alphabet. They were 6 months ahead on a hiring freeze, and 3 months ahead on layoffs. They've been thinking about this a lot longer, and markets respond to if you beat the number the market was expecting, not if you beat internal or external forecasts.

Meta genuinely has a good ad product. It's not hard to setup a campaign that very cost effectively hits an otherwise difficult to target audience that actually has potential for a conversion. It's very easy for Facebook ads to mix media and textual information because it's well integrated with their products that display the same thing.

Google's ads are either contextual to the query, thus, predatory (to both the client and the user) since it's trying to pass off marketing as information, and companies practically have to defensively advertise targeting their own keywords so they outbid competitors doing the same. Or they're video/display ads which are pretty much garbage in their conversion rates because they tend to be interruptive to the product experience and creatively restrictive since they can't mix images, videos, and text in the same ad container. It's also difficult to set up a successful campaign and it's very easy getting burned with expensive mistakes. Nevermind the high amount of fraud in their network and very poor brand safety (ad sharing a context with undesirable content). You can only burn advertisers so many times with poor returns before they start to drastically cut their spend.