Meta’s $2 Billion AI Acquisition Is Now Pushing Get-Rich-Quick Ads

Meta spent $2 billion last year buying an AI company called Manus. Now that company is running ads that look suspiciously like the kind of get-rich-quick schemes you’d see on late-night TV, except with a shiny AI wrapper.

The pitch: Find local businesses that don’t have websites, or have terrible ones. Use Manus’s AI to build them a site. Then call them up and sell it to them. Easy money, right?

Manus was paying content creators to build Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts promoting this as a lucrative side gig. The creators’ TikTok accounts got taken down after The Verge started asking questions. Some of those videos appeared as official Manus ads, but the posts on the paid creator accounts themselves often didn’t make it clear they were being compensated.

I’ve seen this movie before. It’s the same old “build websites for local businesses” hustle that people have been peddling since the late 90s, just with an AI coat of paint. The difference is that now it’s backed by a company Meta owns, which means Meta is implicitly endorsing this approach.

What bothers me most isn’t the business model itself – people have made legitimate money doing web development for local businesses. It’s the presentation. The ads frame this as effortless passive income, which is almost never true. And the paid creators hiding their relationship with Manus? That’s the kind of thing that gets regulators interested.

Meta hasn’t commented publicly on this yet, but I’d be surprised if they don’t distance themselves from the campaign soon. This is the kind of optics that makes a company look desperate for AI ROI, and not in a good way.