“
“I imagine that all of these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”
”
Zuckerberg said that the boycott is more a PR issue than the one that is going to harm the social-media giant’s bottom line, according to a report released Wednesday by The Information, which cited a transcript of the speech Zuckerberg gave at one of the employees-only virtual town hall on Friday.
While generating titles, the boycott affects only a tiny fraction of Facebook, which is about 8 million advertisers. The company generates substantially all of its revenue from ads.
Read: Here’s the big brands that have pulled ads from Facebook
The #StopHateForProfit campaign has been started by rights groups last month, the call for large corporations to stop their Facebook advertising spend for the month of July to protest against the inability of the company to control the hate speech, threats of violence, and the misinformation on its platform.
A part of Friday’s virtual town hall has been released to the public from Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, where he announced changes in the policies repress the hate and the vote of the misinformation. But it would have been more direct in private remarks to the employees, saying Facebook would not cave to the pressure.
“You know, we don’t technically all of our policies because of all the pressure that people apply to us,” he said, according to The Information. “And, in fact, usually I tend to think that if someone goes there and threatens you to do something, that really puts you in a box where, in some respects, it is even more difficult to do what they want, because now it looks like you are capitulating, and that sets the wrong long-term incentives for others to do it [to you] as well.”
The Experts told MarketWatch on Wednesday that the companies join the boycott may see a bigger boost to their trademark of Facebook ads would be generated in the first place.
“By pulling the ads, they save money and a low risk of reporting the positive results of the advertising and marketing of their brands in the eyes of constituents,” Gerard Francis Corbett, a consultant in communication strategy, based in Silicon Valley, told MarketWatch. “The Facebook boycott is a low-risk way for entrepreneurs to make a [political] statement.”
Earlier this week, Rohit Kulkarni, executive director of MKM Partners, wrote in a note to clients that the announcement of the boycott would have an impact on less than 5% of Facebook’s income.
Facebook shares
FB,
surged nearly 5% Wednesday and are up about 16% year-on-year, compared to the S&P 500 index
SPX,
A 3.5% drop.
