Facebook is set to announce that more than 5 million businesses now advertise on its platform monthly and this is up 2 million from March 2016. This was made known by Facebook Chief Operating Officer (COO) Sheryl Sandberg in an interview with Reuters where she added that the number of ad buyers was an important milepost, showing that Facebook has room to grow despite its massive scale.
This comes as a separate report has it that Facebook would actually eat into Google’s digital ad dominance this year and while digital advertisement spending is expected to jump 16 percent this year in the US alone, Facebook’s share of that market is expected to jump 32 percent in 2017. Google and Facebook are expected to control about 46 percent of the global digital ads market by 2018 and with Yahoo being acquired by Verizon, this could further widen or maybe contract depending on just how Verizon manages its new acquisition.
While ads makes up about 84 percent of Facebook’s revenue, much of that money comes from big businesses which spend big but Facebook is signaling that they plan to do more in the coming months to attract spending from small businesses. Sheryl Sandberg said “Small businesses provide such important products and services, but they also are a huge engine of job growth in a world where job growth is increasingly uncertain and something people really worry about,” and of the 5 million businesses, the biggest industries are e-commerce, entertainment/media and retail according to Reuters. It’s also interesting that a staggering 75 percent of those businesses are outside the US and are situated in some of the emerging markets like Brazil, India, Mexico and Argentina among others.
Mobile is now key to Facebook’s success as more than 90 percent of its 1.9 billion users access the site through the mobile app while 50 percent of those businesses create ads on mobile. Little wonder Facebook has tried to make its main app more attractive to users with the latest addition being Stories.
