Facebook has a very long tail of advertisers in line for spots. The biggest companies boycotting just gave the same ad space to smaller companies. Facebooks b

Facebook has a very long tail of advertisers in line for spots. The biggest companies boycotting just gave the same ad space to smaller companies. Facebooks business is built exceptionally well to be resilient to these sorts of boycotts, and the results are in the pudding. Facebook revenue YoY up 11% and Alphabet down 2%. >[At Facebook] Q1 2019 the top 100 advertisers made up less than 20% of the company’s ad revenue; most of the $69.7 billion the company brought in last year came from its long tail of 8 million advertisers. >This focus on the long-tail, which is only possible because of Facebook’s fully automated ad-buying system, has turned out to be a tremendous asset during the coronavirus slow-down. >This explains why the news about large CPG companies boycotting Facebook is, from a financial perspective, simply not a big deal. Unilever’s $11.8 million in U.S. ad spend, to take one example, is replaced with the same automated efficiency that Facebook’s timeline ensures you never run out of content. Moreover, while Facebook loses some top-line revenue — in an auction-based system, less demand corresponds to lower prices — the companies that are the most likely to take advantage of those lower prices are those that would not exist without Facebook, like the direct-to-consumer companies trying to steal customers from massive conglomerates like Unilever. >In this way Facebook has a degree of anti-fragility that even Google lacks: so much of its business comes from the long tail of Internet-native companies that are built around Facebook from first principles, that any disruption to traditional advertisers — like the coronavirus crisis or the current boycotts — actually serves to strengthen the Facebook ecosystem at the expense of the TV-centric ecosystem of which these CPG companies are a part. from https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/ https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-and-facebook/