Okay let's do some maths here
Fedi has maybe 200k daily active users overall. After, most people don't use Fedi every day. But okay, let's be ultra generous though and assume 1 million DAU.
Now, how the fuck would a user get sent an ad to begin with, is a good question. Let's say the federated timeline and let's say all these users look at it.
Ads are paid per click or per purchase made thru the ad, impressions don't count anymore because lol. Most people use AdBlock and most people are gonna block the instance once it spews ads, but let's be optimistic and assume no one defeds or uses AdBlock.
Realistic click-thru rates are about 0.35%. Obviously the purchase rate is MUCH lower but let's assume it's all pay per click.
That's 3,500 clicks per day per ad. If all users get served 10 ads a day and click them all (they won't obviously), that's a total of 35,000 clicks. That's totally unrealistic but whatever.
We will assume Meta earns $7 a click which is also a fantasy because most ads don't cost nearly that much.
$245,000 per day gross revenue, based on fantasy numbers which are way, way, way too optimistic.
$89.4 million a year in revenue, based on figures that are way way way way way way way way way too good to be real. They make more than that *per day* on their fucking main site lmao. And this is before compensation for devs, the admins that need to be bought to actually get the ads to users, etc. And the infrastructure needed to gather enough intelligence to even target the ads to begin with.
If they had 50 people working on this, and realistically it'd be more, it would probably work out to about $10m in employee compensation alone. That's before insurance, etc.
There is virtually *no money to be made* for a company the size of Meta, versus the commensurate effort.
This investment is hardly worth it to them.
Get real y'all.