Here's What Facebook Should do With its new Surge of ad Dollars

Facebook earned a whopping $9.32 billion USD in ad revenue for Quarter 2, 2017 beating projections of $9.2 billion. This translates into a 44.7% year-over-year growth for the social media giant.

Profits also grew 71% year-over-year to $3.9 billion USD making it the first time Facebook has made more ad profit than Google. Google‘s ad dollars number plunged to $3.524 billion USD in Q2, 2017.

This is largely due to a hefty $2.7 billion antitrust fine from the EU, which Google will appeal.

Facebook did not only grow ad revenue and profits but also its user base. Monthly and Daily Active users saw growth from 1.94 billion to 2.006 billion and 1.284 billion to 1.325 billion respectively.

With over 5 million advertisers and growing, it’s clear the ad dollars are going to keep rolling in. The question is how should Facebook spend this “New Money”? #Facebook posted more profit than #GoogleClick To Tweet

What Facebook Should do With its new Surge of ad Dollars

Free iPhones for everyone? Certainly not a bad idea but we can think of a few less flashy ways for Zuckerberg to spend Facebook’s money. Hopefully, it doesn’t just go into his 2020 U.S. Presidential campaign.

More Acquisitions

Every great CEO knows when to build and when to buy. Mark Zuckerberg has proven to be good at this. This is evident in the acquisition of both Whatsapp and Instagram–who have done quite well recently. With Facebook’s continuous growth in profit, this puts the company in a good position to acquire startups that’ll speed up the attainment of its goals.
Free Internet

Even though Mark Zuckerberg started internet.org to bring basic internet to everyone in the world by 2026, progress seems to have stalled. Facebook should revamp its efforts to provide a less limited internet connectivity for everyone. Afterall, the more people connected to the internet, the more people likely to join Facebook.
Better Compression

Facebook has prioritized video content. This is the reason why your timeline is cluttered with a lot of auto-playing videos. Though Facebook does a great job at usually showing you only good videos, all those videos only do one thing: kill your data plan. If you’re on a limited data plan, you’ll notice a quick scroll through your Facebook feed drains a lot of your data. For this reason, Facebook should develop a better compression for its content. What would be impressive is to be able to enjoy content at current quality whilst reducing the size to 1/10 of the current size.
Improve Whatsapp Status

With billions in profits and lots of engineers at Facebook’s disposal, one would expect a seamless experience on all products from Facebook. This is not the case of Whatsapp Status. The current version of Whatsapp Status is a little rusty compared to its originator Snapchat–despite it growing more than Snapchat so far this year. It’s time for Mark to spend some of the development budgets to make it more seamless.