I guess, WhatsApp business just never caught up on our side of the world, but every time I’m outside of US/Canada, there will be some sort of business (like a restaurant) that will contact me through it. Assuming they’re making some pennies from WhatsApp Business.

Click-to-message is $10B/year, click-to-message in WhatsApp alone was $1.5B 1.5 years ago. They make buckets of money from business services on WhatsApp.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/02/15/metas-next-profit-...

Plenty of brands still advertise om Instagram.

weirdly, for my link that redirected to my countries' local coca-cola facebook brand page (denmark) which has its latest post 1 hour ago (8th feb 2023). I didnt know that kind of location-based redirect was a thing on facebook, interesting.

You're using a brand advertiser as an example when you should be using direct response advertiser as your example. Brand advertisers pay the least since their advertising is predicated on reaching a lot of people cheaply multiple times while direct advertisers pay the most since their advertising is predicated on getting people to convert immediately and judge their return accordingly.

The fact that you don't see Coca Cola ads means that Meta is able to find advertisers willing to pay more than them to reach you that you are more likely to convert immediately on.

I just opened Facebook to see what I’d see on the app, and just a couple of scrolls gave me: Planet Fitness, Expedia and a bunch of airline ads.

People will always complain how something doesn’t work, how they pulled out their ad money and etc. But then you see ad spend growth on every big platform.