It was Valentine’s Day when Meta’s ad platform started going off the rails. RC Williams, the co-founder of the Philadelphia-based marketing agency 1-800-D2C, had set one of Meta’s automated ad tools to run campaigns for two separate clients. But when he checked the platform that day, he found that Meta had blown through roughly 75 percent of the daily ad budgets for both clients in under a couple of hours.

Williams told The Verge that the ads’ CPMs, or cost per impressions, were roughly 10 times higher than normal. A usual CPM of under $28 had inflated to roughly $250, way above the industry average. That would have been bad enough if the revenue earned from those ads wasn’t nearly zero. If you’re not a marketer, this might feel like spending a week’s worth of grocery money on a prime cut of wagyu at a steakhouse, only for the waiter to return with a floppy slider.

The Verge spoke to several marketers and businesses that advertise on Meta’s platforms who tell a similar story. Meta’s automated ad platform has been blowing through budgets and failing to deliver sales. Small businesses have seen their ad dollars get wiped out and wasted as a result, and some have said the bouts of overspending are driving them from Meta’s platforms.

“Meta’s unwillingness to be transparent or accountable with the performance issues and glitches is causing mass uncertainty,” Karl Baker, founder of meditation startup Mindfulness Works, wrote in a message to The Verge.

The faulty ad service in question, known as Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, is part of a full suite of AI-enabled ad tools that Meta pitches to businesses as a faster and more efficient alternative to manual ad campaigns. To create an ad campaign, advertisers upload their creative assets, pick their conversion goals (e.g., getting more customers to make purchases on Instagram), and then set their budget caps. Meta hyped Advantage Plus shopping campaigns during earnings calls as a carefree, “set it and forget it” automated solution to online ads. But that hasn’t been the case, marketers say. 

Advantage Plus shopping campaigns have been unpredictable, seemingly working well on some days and then not so well on other days. The subreddit r/FacebookAds has become a sort of 24/7 help desk for Advantage Plus. Recent headings discussing the issues include “Advantage+ sucks,” “Is Facebook broken rn,” and “Is it just me?”

“People are always saying, ‘Is it me?’ or ‘Is it Meta?’” Baker said.

What Williams and many other marketers thought was a one-time glitch by Advantage Plus ended up becoming a recurring incident for weeks. “Since February 14th, [Advantage Plus] has overspent on numerous occasions and ignored the cost caps we have in place on it,” he said. 

Problems have persisted into April. “We have a couple of clients for whom we completely stopped Advantage Plus due to these anomalies,” said Aniruddha Mishra, director of growth at Miami-based digital marketing agency Node Media. He noted that for some clients, CPMs on Meta were anywhere from three to four times more expensive than they were last year. 

Advertisers say getting support from Meta has been a challenge, too. Meta laid off thousands of employees over the past year and gutted many of its customer support teams. As Digiday reported, Meta’s ad accounts teams were downsized, and many client inquiries are now being directed to AI chatbots. Several of the marketers that The Verge spoke to said that there’s been a noticeable decline in responsiveness from Meta since the transition. 

“The only thing [Meta] acknowledged was there was a platform bug on February 14th and apologized for the inconvenience,” said Williams. “They didn’t tell us what actually happened.”

Meta eventually refunded 1-800-D2C for the incident, but Williams said it took him several tries to finally get someone from the company to acknowledge him. The company issued the refund almost a month after the incident.

While some users speculate that Advantage Plus is “glitching” or “broken,” Meta’s response has been to insist that the tool is functioning as it should. 

“I’ve reached out to representatives at Meta, and I’ve been told that they’re not aware of any sort of glitch, which is truly shocking, because all my co-founder friends who work in e-commerce share this sentiment. They’re dealing with the same thing,” said Adriel Darvish, the CEO of a luxury handbag and jewelry service called Switch, in a phone interview with The Verge. “This is something universal that everyone is experiencing.”

With the problems continuing to pile on, Williams said his marketing firm completely halted its use of Advantage Plus in early April. Instead, they’ve gone back to the old-fashioned method of buying Facebook and Instagram ads manually. Notably, going back to the pre-AI, pre-automated way of doing things hasn’t really taken a toll on the firm’s human labor force. 

“Maybe an extra 10 to 20 minutes or so to build out the ad sets, but nothing crazy,” said Williams. 

Meta first launched Advantage Plus shopping campaigns globally in the fall of 2022, when the state of online advertising was in an uncertain place. Just a year before, Apple had launched its App Tracking Transparency feature with iOS 14.5, giving users an easy way to opt out of the third-party app-based tracking that powers many online ads. Meta opposed the change, saying it would “change the internet as we know it” and threaten the future of many online businesses. 

But Meta’s real concern was no doubt the threat to its own ad business, which chalked up a $10 billion dip in ad revenue in 2021 due to Apple’s changes. Targeted ads were no longer as effective since brands no longer had access to as much data, and they were becoming more expensive to boot. As a consequence, brands cut back on their online ad spend. 

With Advantage Plus shopping campaigns, Meta promised that AI and machine learning models could effectively replace the big gaping hole left by Apple’s privacy update. 

In lieu of tracking users, Advantage Plus uses the advertiser’s own first-party sales data to help target ads. But online advertisers would be effectively handing the reins over to Meta and no longer have access to the granular targeting controls and detailed analytics they did prior to Apple’s privacy changes.

Although there was a bit of a “learning curve” with Advantage Plus shopping, the tool gradually began to improve. Brands noticed their AI-driven Meta ad campaigns were performing well and poured more of their budgets into the platform. Adweek reported that by April 2023, marketers who had ditched Meta for TikTok ads and newer opportunities like connected TV were starting to come back. 

Advertisers had a honeymoon period with Advantage Plus last year, especially as Meta began packing it with new features. “Advantage Plus was working so well at this point, for most of the clients, that almost 50 to 70 percent of their ad budget is on Meta’s Advantage Plus campaigns. There are so many targeting and evolutions they’ve done in the past year and a half. It delivers a really strong performance if you know how to tweak the right parameters,” said Mishra. 

In an email to The Verge on April 15th, Meta spokesperson Kash Ayodele said the company had fixed a “few technical issues” with its ad platforms. “Our ads system is working as expected for the vast majority of advertisers. We recently fixed a few technical issues and are researching a small amount of additional reports from advertisers to ensure the best possible results for businesses using our apps.”

On an April 24th earnings call, Meta CFO Susan Li said that one Advantage Plus tool led to a “a 28 percent decrease in cost per click or per objective.” Li said Advantage Plus tools are seeing “very strong growth” and that the tools are improving when it comes to conversions.

But marketers are still complaining about underperformance on the platform. “Things have recovered for many, but not all. It’s been a very turbulent end to Q1 and beginning of Q2,” wrote media buyer David Herrmann in a direct message to The Verge. 

The dramatic increase in cost per click (CPC) and CPM is not just a Meta problem — online ads as a whole are getting costlier due to what marketers say are increased inefficiencies, which automation has only made worse. This significantly decreases profits for individual advertisers. And fixing this problem may be more complicated than fixing a “glitch” or series of glitches on Advantage Plus, especially since the millions that Meta as well as Google have poured into automated advertising hasn’t led to more successful ad campaigns. 

“The performance of accounts and campaigns hasn’t intrinsically increased [over the last three years],” noted Hawke Media’s Areen Mayelan. 

When ad campaigns are automated, such as with Meta’s Advantage Plus, “things get brushed under the rug,” said Mayelan. Everything from loose keywords to loose audiences to low-quality ads all effectively become inefficiencies that increase the cost of ads for brands. “Inefficiency results in an increase in CPCs and CPMs, because you’re creating artificial ‘competition’ where there otherwise might not be.” 

Meanwhile, Meta only stands to benefit from the boost in ad revenue. According to Meta’s first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, its ad business is doing just fine. Ad revenue amounted to $35.64 billion for the quarter, an impressive jump of 27 percent from this time in 2023.

Update April 29th, 4:50PM ET: This story has been updated with remarks from Meta’s CFO addressing the performance of Advantage Plus tools. It also clarifies remarks from Ayodele, who says Meta’s technical fixes relate to the ads platform more broadly, not just Advantage Plus.

A company that manufactures video doorbells found by Consumer Reports to contain serious security vulnerabilities has issued a fix, the consumer advocacy group is reporting. Eken Group has issued a firmware update for the affected security products under its own name, as well as those from other brands it has licensing deals with, including Fishbot, Rakeblue, Tuck, and others. All the video doorbells use the Aiwit smartphone app and could be purchased from popular online retailers like Amazon, Shein, Temu, and Walmart. 

Back in February, CR reported that it found vulnerabilities in Eken-produced video doorbells that “could allow a dangerous person to take control of the video doorbell on their target’s home.”

Gaining access to the doorbell didn’t even require any level of hacking knowledge: bad actors could simply download the Aiwit app, go to their target’s home, and hold down the doorbell’s button to pair it with their own smartphones, change their Wi-Fi network, and take control of the device. 

Additionally, anyone with the doorbell’s serial number could remotely view still images from the video feed — no password or account required, CR security experts found. Doorbell owners didn’t receive a notification of any kind if another user accessed their video feed in this manner.

The doorbells also didn’t encrypt the user’s home IP address or Wi-Fi network, leaving both potentially exposed to criminals.

The doorbells that CR initially rated were sold under the brand names Eken and Tuck and seemed identical, down to them both requiring users to download the Aiwit smartphone app. The group later found 10 other seemingly identical doorbells made by Eken but sold under a number of different brand names. 

CR has reviewed Eken’s firmware update and says the problem has been fixed. “While we would prefer that products be safe and secure from their initial launch, the ability of our testing to uncover vulnerabilities results in better products for consumers,” CR’s senior director of product testing, Maria Rerecich, said in its report. 

As a result of CR’s reporting, the FCC has asked Amazon, Sears, Shein, Temu, and Walmart for more details about how they vet products sold on their platform. None of the five retailers have responded to CR’s request for comment on the matter.

Eken’s video doorbells also lacked Federal Communications Commission ID labels, which are required by law, CR found. The company has since added the FCC IDs to the electronic manuals for the doorbells. 

Since CR published its February report, many of the Eken doorbells have been pulled from online retailers. Notably, a number of the doorbells were selected as Amazon: Overall Picks or with the Amazon’s Choice badge, a label with mysterious criteria that Amazon has refused to explain fully and can be found on many dubious products.

If you own an Eken-produced video doorbell, be sure to check if your firmware is up to date. Your doorbell should receive the update automatically, but it’s smart to double-check. Go to the “Devices” page on the Aiwit app and tap on the doorbell’s name, which should open up the settings. The firmware number should be 2.4.1 or higher, which indicates it’s up to date.

Spotify has launched a colorful personality quiz designed to help K-pop fans determine their persona. For those unfamiliar with the K-pop term or its Jungian roots, a “persona” refers to the distinct, public-facing role of each member of a band. The feature leans into K-pop’s status as a major area of growth in the global music industry, which Spotify has been eager to tap into.

The five-question quiz, which fans can take inside the Spotify app, will identify whether you’re a Main Visual, a Main Vocal, a Main Rapper, a Main Dancer, or a Trainee. In a callout to K-pop fan culture, the quiz will also generate a photocard (similar to the band-specific trading cards) with your results that you can share on social media. The feature will be available on Spotify until May 10th.

The rise of K-pop as a global music phenomenon over the past decade is well-documented, and the genre certainly hasn’t lost momentum in the US. Last year, K-pop became the third most popular language of music consumed in the US, according to entertainment data firm Luminate. The US is also the second-largest importer of K-pop music in the world, directly behind Japan.

Similar to how Spotify courts Swifties and other vocal fanbases with interactive features and special playlists, the streaming service hasn’t forgotten devotees of BTS or NewJeans. Although the top 10 most streamed songs and albums last year on Spotify were mostly from the US, international genres, including K-pop, música mexicana, Afrobeats, Indian classical instrumental music and others, rack up millions of streams globally. 

The streaming service noted that streams of the K-pop genre, since 2018, have increased by over 180 percent in the United States and over 360 percent worldwide. Just as English-speaking acts like The Weeknd or Miley Cyrus resonate with fan bases in Asia and South America, it seems wise for Spotify to acknowledge the rampant popularity of international acts like the K-pop group Blackpink and the Colombian singer Karol G within the US.

Fortnite is rolling out an update on Tuesday that includes a new setting that filters out “confrontational” emotes. The v29.30 update will let players “choose not to see” the following emotes: “Laugh It Up”, “Take the L”, “Whipcrack”, and “Make it Plantain.”

The four emotes won’t exactly be hidden per se, they’ll appear as still images in the game — but players performing them won’t dance and they won’t play music. Players can opt to only see these emotes from friends, or hide them altogether.

Though Fortnite has hundreds of different emotes, this group of four are controversial because of how and when players will use them. Fortnite players will often play emotes like “Laugh it Up” and “Take the L” after killing another player or winning a match. Players over the years have complained that emote use has gotten toxic and overly aggressive on the game, with a few players using them to anger other players, or as a sign of disrespect.

Epic Games has taken some flak for its emotes in the past — but for a completely different reason. Many of the emotes mimic popular dance moves, and multiple dance move creators have sued Epic Games accusing the game developer of ripping off their work. Back in February, Epic appeared to reach an agreement with celebrity choreographer Kyle Hanagami that led him to dropping his lawsuit over the “It’s Complicated” emoji. 

Although emotes are a widely used feature in Fortnite, they aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. This latest update appears to be a recognition on Epic’s part that, for at least some players, certain emotes just ruin the vibes. While those players won’t be able to block the emotes outright, they’ll certainly be able to make them less annoying.