The digital advertising crown is quietly changing hands. For the first time since Google launched its search advertising business at the turn of the millennium, another company is about to earn more from online ads than Alphabet does. That company is Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads.
According to a forecast from research firm eMarketer, first reported by the Wall Street Journal on 13 April 2026, Meta is projected to close 2026 with $243.46 billion in net digital ad revenue, narrowly ahead of Google’s $239.54 billion. You can read eMarketer’s full forecast here. The gap between the two companies is just under $4 billion, or about 1.6 percent of Meta’s projected total. eMarketer has tracked both companies for 14 years, and the two have never been this close.
What “net” revenue really means
The keyword in this forecast is net. Google still brings in more money at the top of the funnel. Alphabet reported $82 billion in total ad revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, with Meta trailing at roughly $58 billion for the same period. The catch is that a significant share of what Google earns is paid straight back out.
Google pays Apple an estimated $20 billion every year just to remain the default search engine on iPhones and in the Safari browser. It also shares search ad revenue with websites in its AdSense network and pays YouTube creators a cut of in-stream ad income. When those traffic acquisition costs and revenue-sharing payments are subtracted, eMarketer says Meta is now the bigger business on a like-for-like basis. Meta is projected to command 26.8 percent of global digital ad spending in 2026, just ahead of Google’s 26.4 percent, according to Marketing Dive’s breakdown. Together with Amazon, the three companies will control 62.3 percent of the world’s digital advertising in 2026.
Advantage+: the AI engine almost no one sees
The single biggest driver of Meta’s surge is an AI-powered ad tool called Advantage+. Picture a small business owner in Kilimani or Kisumu who wants to run an Instagram ad. Instead of picking an audience, writing several captions, and manually setting bids, the advertiser now plugs in a budget and a business goal. Advantage+ then decides who should see the ad, how much to bid for each impression, and often generates multiple creative versions on its own.
On Meta’s October 2025 earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company’s end-to-end AI-powered ad tools had reached an annualised revenue run rate of $60 billion. In March 2025, that figure was just $20 billion. The business tripled in seven months, as Marketing Dive reported. For scale, OpenAI took roughly three and a half years to grow ChatGPT to a $60 billion run rate. Advantage+ got there in about the same time, while being largely invisible to consumers.
Reels now out-earns YouTube
Meta’s second big lever is Instagram Reels, the short-video feature built in 2020 to blunt TikTok’s rise. Reels only began carrying ads in 2022. By late 2025, the feature was running at roughly a $50 billion annualised ad revenue rate. For comparison, YouTube’s entire advertising business earned around $36 billion in 2024. A four-year-old feature inside Instagram and Facebook is now out-earning the world’s largest video platform.
This reflects a quiet shift in where attention actually lives. Google still wins the moment someone types in “best loan rates in Kenya” or “Samsung Galaxy S25 price.” Meta wins the hours people spend just scrolling. About 3.6 billion people open a Meta app at least once a day, and AI-driven recommendations have pushed Instagram video consumption up more than 30 percent year-on-year.
A Bernstein Research note widely cited this month found that for every new dollar of incremental online ad spend in the market today, Meta captures about 45 cents, while Google captures about 30 cents. Faster growth on top of a bigger share of new money is how a $4 billion gap eventually closes.
The 2022 near-death moment
It is worth remembering how close this company came to the edge. In early 2022 Apple rolled out App Tracking Transparency, which broke the way Meta knew which ads to show which users. Meta’s CFO at the time estimated the direct hit at $10 billion in lost 2022 revenue. Mark Zuckerberg was simultaneously spending tens of billions on a virtual-reality metaverse that never arrived. Meta’s share price fell roughly 76 percent peak-to-trough between September 2021 and October 2022, and the company laid off more than 21,000 staff across 2022 and 2023. The entire comeback since then has been built on AI: better ad-ranking models, Advantage+, and Reels maturing into a $50-billion-a-year engine.
What this means for Kenya
The headline number is not as abstract as it sounds if you are reading this from Nairobi. Meta’s platforms already dominate digital advertising locally. In the three months to September 2025, Facebook earned KES 6.1 billion from Kenyan advertisers, and Instagram earned a further KES 3.2 billion, according to the Communications Authority of Kenya via Business Daily. Combined, that is 79 percent of Kenya’s entire digital ad spend, while Google, X, TikTok and programmatic networks split the rest.
Kenya has roughly 17.1 million users inside Meta’s local ad audience, 14 million active Facebook users, and around 25 million on WhatsApp. Small businesses routinely budget between KES 10,000 and KES 50,000 a month on Meta ads, and increasingly it is Advantage+, not a human at a Westlands agency, that is deciding who sees those ads. As we previously explained on Techish, any change in how Meta monetises its platforms has an outsized effect on local SMEs and creators.
Kenyan content creators feel this too. Meta only launched In-Stream Ads and Facebook Ads on Reels in Kenya in August 2024, less than two years ago. Those creator payouts ultimately rise and fall with Meta’s overall ad business, which now has a strong tailwind.
The shadow over Google
Google is not collapsing. Its search advertising alone brought in about $198 billion in 2024, more than Meta makes from any single app. But the company is fighting on multiple fronts. In April 2025, a US federal court ruled that Google had illegally monopolised parts of the open-web display advertising market, a ruling the US Department of Justice called a landmark victory. A separate September 2025 ruling addressed Google’s monopoly in general search and search advertising. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s own Gemini are also eating into the share of queries that start in the Google search bar in the first place.
eMarketer’s forecast does not price in any additional hit from those court rulings. If remedies tighten, the $4 billion gap with Meta could widen quickly.
Bottom line
After 26 years of Google at the top of the digital advertising pile, the top spot is about to change hands, by a margin of just $4 billion. The winner is not a scrappy startup. It is the same company investors had written off three years ago. The lesson is that the business of advertising has quietly become the business of artificial intelligence, and Meta, for now, is running the better AI business.
