Abstract
Who actually pays for British party advertising on Facebook and Instagram, and through which pages? I use Meta's public Ad Library Report for the United Kingdom, which lists every advertiser running ads about social issues, elections or politics from October 2019 to October 2026: 90,565 pages that spent about £252 million on 1.51 million ads. I classify 3,531 of these pages as belonging to a party, by party and by tier (national page, leader pages, devolved-nation pages, English-region pages, and local and candidate pages). Party pages account for only 8.3% of the spending, though 19% of the ads. The biggest spenders in the whole library are charities and government bodies; the Labour Party's page ranks eleventh and the Conservatives' thirteenth. Within the party system, structure differs sharply. Labour spent £8.70m through 1,150 pages and put 38% of it through devolved, regional and local pages, against 24% for the Conservatives, whose national page took 58%. Leader pages carry 41% of Labour's and 40% of Reform UK's combined leader and national spending, but 0.7% of the Liberal Democrats'. Reform UK has almost no sub-national tier (4.3% of its spending). Labour spent 14% of its money in Scotland, against 7.7% for the Conservatives, although Scotland has about 8% of the population. The data are lifetime totals, so the paper describes how party advertising is organised rather than what any one campaign did.
Questions this answers
- Do British parties pay for the Facebook pages that people already engage with?
- Who pays for British party advertising on Facebook and Instagram?
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Who Pays for the Party? The Structure of British Party Advertising on Meta, 2019 to 2026. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23415022