Abstract
Parties and their leaders run Facebook pages that attract audiences without payment, and they also pay Meta to put ads in front of people. Do they pay for the pages that people already engage with? I join two sources for 25 British party and leader pages: monthly counts of reactions, shares and comments from CrowdTangle, from March 2016 to September 2020, and lifetime advertising spend on political and issue ads in Meta's Ad Library Report, from October 2019 to October 2026. Among the 12 party pages, advertising spend follows organic engagement closely (Spearman rank correlation 0.76). A tenfold difference in monthly engagement goes with roughly an eightfold difference in spend (log-log slope 0.90, 11 pages with spend). Leaders are different. Their pages earn most of the engagement but get little of the money. Using leaders who were active in 2019 and 2020, the leader's page took 75% of Labour's leader-plus-party engagement but 36% of its spend; for the Conservatives the figures are 68% and 7%, for the Liberal Democrats 16% and 1%, and for the SNP 51% and 2%. Nigel Farage's page comes closest to being paid for in line with its engagement. Parties thus pay for their own brand pages and rely on leaders' pages to attract the audience without payment. The two datasets only partly overlap in time, so the paper describes a pattern across pages, not the effect of spending on engagement.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Paid and Earned on Facebook: Do British Parties Pay for the Pages that People Engage With?. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23415020