Meta bought Manus for $2 billion last year. Now they’re running ads that look like they were ripped straight from a late-night infomercial, promising you can make quick, easy money with AI.
The pitch is simple: find local businesses that either have no website or a terrible one, use Manus’ AI to build them a shiny new site, then call them up and sell it to them. It’s the digital equivalent of flipping houses, except the houses are built by a bot and the buyer didn’t ask for one.
As part of the campaign, Manus paid content creators to set up Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok accounts promoting the AI tool as a lucrative side hustle. The creators’ TikTok accounts were taken down after The Verge started asking questions. Coincidence? Probably not.
Some of those videos ran as official Manus ads. But the posts on the paid creator accounts often didn’t make it clear they were sponsored. That’s the kind of disclosure problem that gets platforms in trouble with the FTC — not that Meta seems particularly worried.
I’ve seen this playbook before. It’s the same energy as those “work from home” Facebook ads that promise $5,000 a week stuffing envelopes. Only now the envelope-stuffing is AI-powered website flipping, and the platform running the ads is also the one that owns the tool. Meta is effectively selling you the shovel and then telling you where to dig for gold — while taking a cut of whatever you find.
Let’s be real about what this looks like. Small business owners already get bombarded with cold calls from SEO scammers and “digital marketing experts” who promise the moon. Now they’ll get calls from people armed with AI-generated sites that probably look okay at first glance but have zero real customization, zero actual market research, and zero guarantee the business actually wants a new website.
The whole thing feels like a cash grab dressed up in AI hype. Meta spent $2 billion on Manus, and they need to justify that price tag. So instead of building something genuinely useful, they’re pushing a hustle culture narrative that preys on people’s desperation for easy income.
I’m not saying AI can’t help small businesses. It can. But this approach — target people who don’t have a website, build one without asking, then try to sell it to them — is the digital equivalent of keying someone’s car and then offering to sell them a paint job.
And the creator angle? That’s the part that really bugs me. Paying influencers to shill a product without proper disclosure isn’t just shady; it’s the kind of thing that gets platforms slapped with fines. Meta knows better. They just don’t care.
The Verge got the TikTok accounts pulled, but the ads are still running. The campaign is still live. And somewhere right now, someone is watching a video that says “make $10,000 a month with AI websites” and thinking it’s a legitimate opportunity.
It’s not. It’s a get-rich-quick scheme dressed in a neural network. And Meta is the one selling the tickets.
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