Facebook made about $60 billion worldwide last year in the United States and Europe. A rough back of the napkin calculation says the outage last week cost them around $150 million. That's a rounding error for Zuckerberg's new worth, but he and his shareholders aren't going to stand for it.
To recoup, Zuck and Co has alerted advertisers they "may see accelerated delivery as our services recover from the outage." IndieHackers translates that into plain English: "Accelerated delivery? In simple terms, Facebook will try to spend advertisers' money faster for the day (and possibly the days ahead, depending on your budget settings)."
What is the effect of placing more ads that usual? They become less effective.
From IndieHackers:
I did some additional research and came across this AdWeek article with a first-hand experience from a media buyer who manages multiple ad accounts:
"One media buyer noted Facebook's delivery numbers have gone up dramatically this morning as the platform pumped up delivery to make up the losses."
And what happens when you show too many ads too fast? You see a drop in conversions:
The agency is seeing a drop of at least 50% in conversions compared to what it normally expects, across roughly half a dozen clients. For some clients, it's more than 50%.
Is there a malicious intent here? Maybe it's the FB algorithm at play, maybe it's someone at Facebook saying "speed things up and try to recover our revenue ASAP?
If you buy ads on Facebook, IndieHackers recommends pausing your campaign: "It's far better to spread out the money you were meant to spend during the outage than to listen to Facebook and spend it all at once."
[image: Anthony Quintano from Westminster, United States – Mark Zuckerberg F8 2019 Keynote, CC BY 2.0]
