And most of those ad dollars don’t come from companies like Starbucks and Coca Cola so much as the sprawling list of small and medium-sized businesses who use Facebook to attract customers and build their brands.
Of those, the highest-spending 100 brands accounted for $4.2 billion in Facebook advertising last year, according to data from marketing research firm Pathmatics — or only about 6% of the platform’s ad revenue.
The last time Facebook shared that data itself was in April 2019, when COO Sheryl Sandberg said the top 100 advertisers represented “less than 20%” of total ad revenue.
And as recently as this January, months before the current ad boycott, some of the world’s biggest advertisers called on Facebook and other tech companies to do more to prevent ads appearing next to violent content and hate speech.
And while the growing chorus of brands swearing off advertising is unlikely to kill its bottom line for now, the bad press appears to have rattled Facebook — it held a call with around 200 advertisers last week in which a company executive admitted that there was a “trust deficit” it needs to address.
