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TikTok's message to Meta: If you won't take our ad dollars, your competitors will.
Meta took a bold stance this month by blocking ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, from running ads on Meta apps in some markets. Why? Well, Meta's answer was pretty straightforward. It didn't want to "run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps."
TikTok is now redirecting that ad spend elsewhere.
Since the ban went into effect on October 8, TikTok has shifted its ad budgets to other platforms like YouTube and Pinterest, according to allocation estimates provided to CMO Insider by the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
The share of TikTok's ad spend that went to YouTube rose to 17% between October 9 and October 16, up from 9% in the first week of October. Meanwhile, its ad spend on Pinterest grew to 9% during the same period, up from 3% in the first week of October. A majority of TikTok's spend — 58% — went to mobile-app ad networks like Google's AdMob, up from 19% at the start of October, when Meta was still an option.
Meta's move against TikTok "highlights the growing intensity of the competition across the digital landscape and across the two of them," said Kate Black, EVP of social strategy at Horizon Media. "For marketers, this really just reinforces the need to be agile and build balanced media strategies — and not having all your eggs in one basket."
Meta's TikTok ousting isn't unprecedented. Other platforms like Amazon have previously blocked competitors from running ads, while Twitter in late 2022 restricted users' ability to link to their accounts on social apps like Instagram and Mastodon, calling it "free promotion."
"Declining promotional services to a competitor is a normal business practice across industries," a Meta spokesperson said. Meta's changes will impact advertising policies in the US, Canada, Egypt, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam.
For Meta, a company that pulled in $117 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, losing one advertiser won't hurt much. Still, TikTok and ByteDance were notably prominent spenders on Meta's apps, according to Sensor Tower.
Meta will also lose ad spend from third-party marketers that link to TikTok or other ByteDance properties in their ads, further increasing its potential losses. Direct-to-consumer brands that may want to drive potential customers to TikTok Shop will miss out.
No Meta, no problem
For TikTok, losing access to Meta's more than 3 billion monthly users is a setback.
Like any social media giant, TikTok is incentivized to grow, grow, grow. Ads that target new users and drive new app downloads are part of the playbook — a strategy Meta uses to promote its own apps, like Instagram, too.
One TikTok staffer focused on user acquisition, James Gao, posted a LinkedIn callout on Sunday asking people to get in touch if they had ad inventory that could help the company meet its goals.
Horizon Media's Black said that while Meta controls the "lion's share" of social budgets, there are plenty of viable alternatives when it comes to using an ad to drive an action like an app download. Besides Google, YouTube, and Pinterest, marketers are increasingly turning to other platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, she said.
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Dan is a correspondent at Business Insider covering TikTok, YouTube, and the business of social media.He writes about how creators earn a living from social apps, the inner workings of companies like TikTok, and the many ways that social media is impacting Hollywood and other industries like e-commerce, sports, music, and news.He previously wrote about marketing and entrepreneurship at Ad Age and Inc. Magazine. He was a McGraw Scholar in business journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and a graduate of Middlebury College. Disclosure: Dan previously worked at the ad tech company, The Trade Desk, where he was granted stock as part of his compensation.
Sydney Bradley has been covering media and tech for Business Insider since 2020. She breaks news and writes extensively about Instagram and Facebook, as well as new social media startups, dating apps, the creator economy, venture capital, and tech culture.She regularly contributes to BI's "After Hours" series, where our reporters dive into the social scenes shaping tech, media, and finance.Sydney's reporting on Instagram was nominated as a finalist for the 2021 Los Angeles Press Club National Entertainment Journalism Awards.She graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in American Studies. You can follow Sydney's work on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram at @sydneykbradley.Have a tip? You can also contact her via encrypted messaging app Signal (@sydneykbradley.123), encrypted email ([email protected]), or standard email ([email protected]). Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.
