Google might have contributed to Facebook’s earnings for the first quarter in 2020, but will likely have a greater impact on the social network's revenue in the second quarter of 2020 based on the dozen of ads that began running in April.
I have been seeing several ads in the United States, so I began looking into several Google Facebook pages to see if I could find other types of ads from the search engine. I found several dozen sponsored ads about Chrome, Google Play, Workplace & Office across regions from South Korea and Japan, to Germany and Poland as well as France and Slovakia.
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The video ad running in Poland focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic. The message reads: “Innovations have never been more needed than now! Together, we can improve the work of medical care, sales people, teachers, entrepreneurs and volunteers.”
Facebook reported revenue of $17.74 billion, up 17% compared with a year ago. And as members shelter at home, monthly active users hit 2.6 billion worldwide, up 10% year-over-year.
Google Workplace & Office is running ads in France for Family Link, a service launched in March 2017 that is designed to help parents keep track of what a child under the age of 13 is doing on an Android device.
Facebook on Wednesday said advertising began to stabilize in April, which is when I began seeing multiple ads from Google.
“There is a tremendous amount of macro uncertainty,” Dave Wehner, Facebook CFO, said during the earnings announcement Wednesday. “So it's difficult to extrapolate performance based on a small sample of data. After initial steep decrease in ad revenue in March, we have seen signs of stability reflected in the first three weeks of April.”
Ad revenue has been approximately flat compared with a year ago, down from the 17% year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2020.
“The April trends reflect weakness across all of our user geographies, as most of our major countries have had some sort of shelter-in-place guidelines in effect.”