A media buyer buys attention and turns it into enquiries. Here is the detail of the work, and enough to choose between a freelancer, an agency and an employee.
Media buying is the purchase of online advertising space. On Meta as anywhere else, nobody buys a slot at a listed price: every impression is settled by an instant auction, which weighs what you are prepared to pay against the interest your ad actually generates.
Hence the peculiarity of the role: an ad people watch costs less to deliver than the same audience bought with a boring one. The work is therefore not to spend a budget, but to feed that auction and correct it continuously.
The job shows up mostly in what repeats. There are few big decisions and a lot of small ones, taken from what yesterday's numbers showed.
The three options solve the same problem under different constraints. An agency brings a team and continuity, at the price of a contact who is almost never the person working on the account. An employee knows your trade better than anyone, but represents a fixed cost that only a substantial ad budget absorbs.
A freelancer sits between the two: few accounts, answering in person, at a cost in proportion. In exchange there is no team behind them, which means picking someone whose scope genuinely matches what you need.
The question is not the provider's fee, it is the volume of data. Below a delivery budget of roughly a thousand euros a month, you will not be able to tell a bad campaign from a simple lack of volume: the numbers move too much to decide anything from them.
The other threshold is your margin. Until you know what you make on a sale, no acquisition cost can be called good or bad. That is the calculation to run before handing anything to anyone.
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