During the rising social tension stemming from the incident that led to the death of George Floyd and U.S. President Donald Trump‘s post not being removed or labelled by Facebook, the social networking giant had lost more than 500 advertisers who were said to have boycott the platform over the company’s stance on “Hate Speech”.
But the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg believes that they will all come back to the platform as an internal meeting held by the company showed this kind of sentiment. Zuckerberg said “My guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”
The Information a media outlet got a hold of the transcript of the meeting where the CEO addressed the concerns of Facebook employees over major brands pausing ad spending on the company.
Mark Zuckerberg’s stance since the beginning of the push back had remained the same where he believes that the company doesn’t have to police people’s discussion on it’s platform as well as stating the U.S. President post weren’t violating it’s terms and community guidelines.
In the internal meeting, he said, “We’re not gonna change our policies or approach on anything because of a threat to a small percent of our revenue, or to any percent of our revenue.”
Meanwhile ad revenue is the largest source of income for Facebook and the company’s CEO made it well clear enough during his meeting with the house over privacy and data management last year. Zuckerberg made it emphatically that his company “run ads”. Last year, the company generated nearly $70 billion in revenue.
According to a CNN report that though big brands such as Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Starbucks and Target which are well among those who have boycotted the social media giant they’re not just the biggest spenders on the platform. The report furthered by stating that only three out of 25 top spenders on Facebook ads have publicly confirmed that they will be joining the boycott. These top 25 spenders account for nearly US$2 billion or 3% of the revenue.
Aside Google, Facebook is the second largest ad network company in the world and a lot of advertisers are joining the boycott for a month as of now and have continued to require Facebook take accountability of it’s user’s conversation on the platform.
And speaking of the large share of Facebook in the ads network throughout the internet, the company holds a staggering 21% market share according to reports which might not be feasible for all companies unless they’ve got a much more solid back up if they decide to join the boycott.
So with Zuckerberg thinking advertisers will come back after a while, he might just be very right because the statistics are in favor of the company for now. Meanwhile the company needs to make effort in taking some responsibilities as well as ensuring the platform is well cleared off of hate hate speech in order to bring back majority of it’s advertisers who have joined the boycott.
