BILLION IN ECONOMIC ACTIVITY ANNUALLY
Meta Research
Meta proudly supports the people and economy of the United States
In the US, Meta’s advertising technologies are linked to:
MILLION JOBS
Meta in the economy, and every state
Meta helps businesses connect with their customers and reach new audiences, thus helping to build and grow the US economy. Learn more about Meta’s role in the US and each state’s economy in the reports below:
Economic Contribution Calculation Methodology
We calculate the economic activity linked to Meta in the United States and each individual state based on the economic flows associated with our advertising and non-advertising services.
U.S. businesses spent a total of $49 billion on ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) in the calendar year 2022. Using experimental evidence from Tadelis et al. (2023),* which finds that each dollar spent on Meta ads leads to $3.31 in advertiser revenues, we estimate advertisers earn $162 billion in the U.S. from Meta ads. To this, we add $2 billion in revenues from Meta’s non-ad businesses—mostly through the sale of hardware—to arrive at a total of $164 billion in total sales.
We then use standard input-output methodology and multipliers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) to estimate how much total economic activity and employment is generated each year by the supply chains that support these sales. We first match revenues for our advertising businesses to the corresponding verticals/industries categorized by the BEA. Then, we apply industry-specific national economic multipliers published by the BEA to the revenues for each vertical/industry. Economic multipliers measure, for each dollar in business revenues, how much additional economic activity can be linked to it via (i) the business activity of input suppliers and (ii) day-to-day spending by employees. These two effects are often referred to as “indirect” and “induced” contributions, respectively.
Applying the BEA multipliers to Meta-supported advertiser revenue estimates and Meta's own non-advertising revenues, we find that $415 billion in economic activity and 3.1 million total jobs is linked to US supply chains relying on our platforms in 2022. We apportion the national estimates based on the Gross State Product (GSP) shares of each state to arrive at the amount of state-specific output and employment linked to Meta.
Note that, to be conservative, these economic contribution figures do not include revenues generated for businesses through Meta’s free services and apps, such as business pages. The figures presented here also do not include the economic value that our free services deliver to our users.