MurmAds — Meta Ad Library spy panel

MurmAds turns the public Meta Ad Library page you already have open into a research panel. No account, no login, no scraping service — it reads the page in your browser, and nothing about you leaves your machine. WHAT META PUBLISHES, SHOWN AS WHAT IT IS EU transparency rules make Meta print an amount spent and an audience size on ads served in the EU. It rarely prints one number. It prints an interval (€10K–€15K), a ceiling (under €100), a floor (€1M+), or now and then an exact figure. Those are four different claims, and the panel keeps them different: an interval stays an interval, a ceiling states only its upper end, a floor states only its lower end. A bound is rounded only in the direction that keeps what you read a true statement about what Meta actually put on the page. That is a repair, not a boast. Three of those four forms used to come out as exact figures: a "<€100" ceiling as a flat €100, a "1M+" audience floor as a flat 1M, and a €5,000–€6,000 amount written in a language that groups thousands with a space as €0–€6. They no longer do. A line that cannot be read now yields nothing at all, and the slot reads "not disclosed" instead of a figure nobody ever printed. A FIGURE LOOKS DIFFERENT DEPENDING ON WHERE IT CAME FROM Four kinds of number can appear in this panel, and you can tell them apart without being told which is which. COUNTED, we counted it on the page: a solid filled block, and the display typeface, which is reserved for tallies and used for nothing else in the product. COMPUTED, we worked it out: never that typeface, and the rule that produced it is printed underneath, so a model output can never pass as a count. REFUSED, no number exists and none can be made: a dashed box with an em dash in it, at the full size of a real figure, because "Meta publishes no impressions, clicks or conversions for anyone's ads" is a finding and earns the room a finding gets. WITHHELD, the number exists and it sits behind the upgrade: a hatched block, so you see the size and shape of what is being held rather than a blur pretending to be data. There is a fifth mark for a published bound. The edge notches open on the side the bound is open — €1M+ opens to the right, under €100 opens to the left, and a closed range is closed at both ends. Single numerals that look like exact amounts are the ones a reader is likeliest to misread, so they carry the loudest mark on the grid. NO COLOUR CARRIES ANY OF THAT. Print the panel in black and white and every distinction survives. Read it with any form of colour blindness and every distinction survives. It survives a compressed screenshot too. An earlier version of this idea used a tint for provenance, and a tint is the one thing that survives none of the three. The single colour left in the panel means "this is a control you can press" and never says anything about the advertiser. HOW MANY ADS ON THE PAGE DISCLOSED ANYTHING Every summed total carries its denominator: "Disclosed spend · 9 of 16 ads" means seven of those ads published nothing, and the sum covers the nine that did. Ads disclosed in another currency are counted and named separately rather than converted at a rate nobody published. Under each total sits one quiet line naming where it came from: read from this page, from Meta's own EU transparency disclosure. THE SCALING SIGNAL, AND ITS METHOD Each ad gets one word — testing, rising, scaling or evergreen — with the method printed right beside it: by run time × variants. That is the whole model. How long an ad has run, whether it is still live, how many variants exist. No revenue, no impressions, no conversions: Meta discloses none of those for anyone, and the panel says so in a dashed box rather than leaving a gap for you to fill in yourself. The verdict itself is computed, so it is drawn as a computed thing: a word rather than a numeral, with the rule beside it. Variant counts are split by who did the counting — a figure Meta itself put on the page reads as a count; one grouped here is labelled grouped. THE ACCOUNT, IN NUMBERS One block per advertiser: live ads, new this week, average run time, largest creative family, how many read as scaling, and the summed disclosed spend with its denominator. Under it, every other advertiser sharing the page, ranked. A CANVAS FOR SAVED ADS (PRO) Saved ads land on a spatial board instead of a list. Card size is run time × variants, so the long-running families are the big ones. Drag to arrange, zoom to think, export the whole board as a poster PNG. SAVE, TAG, FILTER, DOWNLOAD Save to boards, tag them, narrow by status, media type and signal state — plus platform, CTA and date controls on Pro. Download creatives one at a time on Free, or the whole board at once on Pro. WORKS IN YOUR LANGUAGE The Ad Library renders in the viewer's own language. Tools written against the English page read zero ads for everyone else. This one finds ads by their structure rather than by English wording, and reads the amount-spent line in its local number format — a comma decimal, a space thousands separator, a currency written after the digits — so it keeps working whether your page renders in English, Dutch, German or French. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It reads only the ad library page you loaded. It does not replay Meta's private internal API, which is how some tools in this category get extra data, and why their requests are attributed to your account rather than theirs. No accounts, no tracking, no server. Boards live in your browser. FREE VS PRO Free: all ads and their signals on the visible page, up to 15 saves on one board in list view, basic controls, one watermarked poster per day. Pro (€9.99/mo or €79/yr): the canvas, the disclosed spend and audience reveal, all advertiser roll-ups, unlimited saves and posters, bulk downloads, advanced controls. Part of the MurmTools family — research extensions with honest data. murmtools.com