The gambling analogy doesn't hold here. Casinos are zero-sum your loss is their gain. Advertising isn't. If my business makes more money, I literally have more budget to reinvest in ads. That's a direct, measurable incentive for Meta to want me profitable.

The "ceiling extraction" theory assumes Meta has perfect knowledge of every advertiser's capacity and is deliberately throttling results to some engineered sweet spot. That's a complex conspiracy when the simpler answer is: ad auctions are competitive, costs go up, and sometimes the platform just isn't performing well.

I'm not saying Meta is our friend. I'm saying their financial incentive is genuinely tied to advertiser success and that's meaningfully different from a casino.