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Temu moves its Meta ad volume out of creator partnerships after a fake-account report
Temu cut its weekly Meta partnership ads by 44% after Fortune reported research finding 73 of its 100 busiest creator accounts were probably fake. Its other Meta ad formats grew over the same weeks, so the loss to Meta looks smaller than the partnership count alone suggests.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Online Risk Labs, a Czech research group, estimates Temu spent nearly $1 billion on Instagram and Facebook partnership ads aimed at the UK and 27 EU countries in the 16 months to April 2026.
- ORL judged about 73 of the 100 creator accounts carrying the most Temu ads to be probably fake, citing nonsensical names, frequent renaming and bases in China, Russia, Bangladesh or Iran.
- When Fortune first reported the network on August 31, Temu was running 4,900 separate partnership campaigns a day through it.
- Of the top 100 accounts, 54 stopped carrying partnership ads almost immediately, and by September 4 some 90 accounts showed no Temu advertising at all.
- Temu's partnership ads in Ireland, Cyprus, Austria, Denmark, Latvia and Slovenia stopped almost entirely, according to ORL, and the reason is not clear.
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Why it matters
- decision Temu has moved ad volume out of creator partnerships and into its other Meta formats, so the cost of the cleanup falls mainly on Meta's partnership-ad product.
- exposure Meta's partnership program let one advertiser boost probably fake accounts across Europe for at least 16 months, so any brand buying the format has reason to check which creators its budget pays.
- cost Creators take a cut of the budget that boosts their posts, so part of Temu's spending through the probably fake accounts was paid to whoever runs them.
- exposure The six markets where Temu's partnership ads nearly stopped have strict misleading-ad laws, with possible criminal penalties in four and revenue-linked consumer suits in the other two.
Temu's other ads on Meta rose while its partnership ads fell. ORL's weekly counts put partnership ads at 115,114 in the week of 17 August and 64,008 in the week of 7 September, a drop of 51,106, or 44.4% [15][1]. Take those out of the all-pages totals of 166,523 and 147,013 and the remainder, Temu's other formats, went from 51,409 a week to 83,005, up 31,596, or 61.5% [2]. Total weekly ads fell 11.7% [3]. These are counts. ORL did not publish weekly spend, a split of the nearly $1 billion between real and probably fake creators, or sales data.
Meta said earlier this year that partnership ads were on course for a $10 billion annual run rate across Facebook and Instagram [6]. Spread evenly across ORL's 16-month window, Temu's nearly $1 billion comes to at most about $750 million a year, or 7.5% of Meta's figure [2][4]. The comparison is loose. Meta's number covers both platforms, while ORL's covers one advertiser's ads aimed at the UK and 27 EU countries [6][2]. It is also a ceiling on what the fake accounts put at risk, because Temu's creator network runs to 12,000 or more accounts, many of them legitimate [9], and its budget for legitimate creators appears to have held, according to Fortune [10].
The counts support more than one reading. If Temu is moving the same money into standard ads, Meta keeps most of the revenue under a different product. Should the fake accounts have carried cheap, high-volume placements, dollars fell by less than the count did. The worse case for Meta is that those accounts absorbed a large share of the budget and some of it left the platform. I think the first reading fits the data best: the 31,596 extra non-partnership ads a week replace about 62% of the 51,106 partnership ads that disappeared [8]. That view is wrong if later ORL counts show the other formats falling back while partnership ads stay down.
The busiest account shows how much output one identity carried. "Ya Lilly," with 183,000 Instagram followers, ran in 278,000 Temu ad campaigns during ORL's study period, about 225 a day, according to Fortune [11]. Those two figures do not reconcile. A 16-month window is roughly 487 days, so 278,000 campaigns works out to about 570 a day, and at 225 a day the total would take about 3.4 years [7]. She stopped posting on September 7 [12].
"When you look at their Instagram accounts, you can see that they have not published any new posts/reels since two weeks or so. These are predominantly the accounts based in Russia, with some also based in the United States or China," ORL manager Vendula Prokůpková told Fortune [14]. Neither Temu nor Meta responded to Fortune's requests for comment [13].
What to watch
- Meta's next update on partnership ads, and whether the $10 billion annual run rate it disclosed earlier this year still holds.
- Whether Meta removes the accounts ORL flagged, or changes which creators can take part in partnership ads.
- Any enforcement action or consumer suit in the six countries where Temu's partnership ads stopped, covering ads that ran before August 31.