Who owns your scroll? What Meta ads reveal—and memecoins reinvent

Meta ads sell your data. Memecoins sell a vibe. Here's how two models of monetizing attention show us what Open Money might become.

Here’s another comparison: Meta ads and memecoins. They are both designed to use the leverage of the internet to monetize attention. One (Meta ads) is a classic example of a Web2 adaptation of mass media models. The other (memecoins) is a new kind of money-making animal — chaotic, participatory, and more aligned with the principles of Open Money than with traditional monetization strategies.

Let’s take a look at Meta ads first.

Meta ads are built to extract value from attention at scale. They plug into the network effects of Meta’s sprawling digital empire — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — platforms where billions of people scroll, swipe, and engage. Just like traditional media, people are shown ads mid-stream: in between status updates, sandwiched between stories, or layered into a carousel of distraction.

But here’s where it gets more advanced: behind every ad is an engine of surveillance. Meta tracks clicks, dwell time, likes, shares, pauses — every digital breadcrumb — to create behavioral profiles that fuel algorithmic targeting. The more precisely Meta can predict what you want (or fear), the more valuable you become to advertisers.

For businesses, this is an ideal setup. Targeted ads mean higher conversion, lower spend, and better ROI. For Meta, it’s a flywheel: better targeting means happier advertisers, which means more ad spend, which means more surveillance to improve the model. But for the user? The cost is often invisible but real — the slow erosion of privacy, identity, and autonomy.

Let’s recap:

Meta ads are cheap and efficient — but the real cost is paid in privacy.
The economic structure is extractive — value flows up to the platform, not out to the users.
The system is closed by design — centralized, top-down, opaque.

Memecoins, by contrast, flip the model. They’re not trying to target or extract — they’re trying to catalyze. A memecoin is less like a product and more like a signal. It’s a collective bet, a speculative social event, a viral payload encoded in economic form. Where Meta ads predict behavior, memecoins ride it — rapidly capturing the energy of a meme and turning it into capital.

Let’s recap:

Memecoins are fast and participatory — anyone can create or support one, no gatekeepers required.
The economic structure is open — value flows laterally through networks, not just upward to platforms.
They’re chaotic but creative — coordination emerges from the crowd, not imposed from the top.
They’re risky — but the risk is distributed, and so is the upside.

Yes, memecoins are volatile. Many are born to pump and die. But they offer something radical: a new way for communities to form, signal alignment, and coordinate value — fast. You don’t need permission to create one. You don’t need a Fortune 500 marketing budget. You just need a moment, a meme, and a bit of network energy.

The big idea is this: memecoins monetize attention in a way that’s more native to the internet itself. They don’t rely on central intermediaries or data extraction. Instead, they use code and culture to create value from the ground up.

That’s why they feel more aligned with Open Money. They’re permissionless, composable, and inherently participatory. They’re not just about financial speculation — they’re a new primitive for internet-native coordination.

Meta ads optimize for control. Memecoins optimize for emergence.

And in an era where attention is the scarcest resource, how we choose to monetize it will shape the future of the internet.

This post is part of the Open Money Project, an ongoing series that forms the basis of a longer work. Subscribe to get a weekly update as it unfolds.