If you sell anything, you're the one paying the piper
Almost 98% of Meta's revenue is advertising, which is a polite way of saying it's your marketing budget, and now they want to put an agent between you and your customer as well.
Last week I wrote about Meta's new Muse agent and the small matter of almost 98% of Meta's revenue coming from advertising,1 and judging by who read it, a decent chunk of Meta's engineering team now knows exactly what I think of their business model. Fair enough. What I didn't spell out is the bit that actually matters if you sell anything, which is that the 98% is YOU.2
Pretty much every brand and retailer I talk to is paying more to Meta and Google every year just to stand still, acquisition costs go up, returns on ad spend go down, and whatever margin is left after the platforms have had their cut gets thinner and thinner. And now the plan is to put an AI agent between you and your customer, owned by the same company you're already paying to reach them. Have a guess who'll be paying for placement inside that agent's recommendations, because it won't be the shopper.
The piper gets paid twice, once for the ad and then again for the agent's attention, and you're footing both bills.
There is another way of doing this and it's what we've built at VIA. The buyer's agent tells the network what they actually want, that brief comes to you, and you pay a small fee to receive it and make an offer, rather than paying to shout at people who were never going to buy in the first place. If you make the sale the network takes 2.5%, and if you don't, you've spent a small fee finding out, not a month's ad budget. No auction for placement, no algorithm to keep happy, just real demand from people who said what they wanted.
If you sell and you're tired of paying the piper, set up your seller agent at app.getvia.xyz.
