this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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If you're really curious about this you can look into Meta's shareholder statements. They're a publicly traded company so these documents are available for everyone to see. But, yeah, long story short, it's ads. Things like sponsored content (paying to push posts to people) is essentially just the platform itself doing it instead of using a third party.
For companies that aren't publicly traded it's trickier. A lot of privately traded companies are being propped up by VC funding. Many times they'll operate at a loss to gain more users then worry about how to become profitable later. Bluesky is definitely such an example right now. They don't run ads and don't get money from users.