What do people who own social media platforms gain from it and how? Where do they get the revenue from? I know that ads make up some part of it but is the revenue generated from ads enough?
Ads and selling your personal data. In twitter’s case elon musk also uses it to influence politics and amplify his own opinion.
Some also have subscriptions.
selling your personal data
The major tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc don’t sell user data. That’s a common misconception. The data is what makes the company valuable - nobody else has it. It wouldn’t make sense for them to sell it, because they’d lose their competitive advantage over other companies.
Advertisers can target ads based on the data, but the advertiser never actually sees user data.
Around 97% of Meta’s revenue is from ads. 2.2% is from Reality Labs - things like Meta Quest headsets and Meta Ray Ban smart glasses. The remaining <0.7% is small things like fees from Facebook Marketplace (for orders that are shipped), a cut of credits for Facebook games (apparently that’s still a thing?), etc.
Meta is a public company so all this data is public. See slide #4 in the most recent earnings presentation slides here: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-events/event-details/2025/Q4-2024-Earnings-Call/default.aspx