“Advertisers largely seem to have priced in temporary outrage as a cost of doing business with platforms,” Ana Milicevic, principal and co-founder of management consultancy Sparrow Digital Holdings in the US, told The Drum at the time. Facebook’s average revenue per user increased 16% from April 2018 to April 2019. In March 2019, the WFA called on the industry to hold Facebook to account after the social network was used to live-stream a terror attack in New Zealand.īut despite several of the country’s major companies pulling their Facebook ad spend at least temporarily, advertisers in the rest of the world did not seem to care. (The company does not break down earnings down to those of specific, individual platforms such as YouTube.) The boycotting advertisers had returned by October that year. Mizuho Bank in Japan said at the time that Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, would lose 1% of its value if 10% of advertisers had pulled their spends.Īnd what happened in the end? Alphabet’s revenue increased from $24.8bn to $26bn from the first to the second quarters of 2017. Google announced changes to YouTube that month.Īccording to US ad analytics platform MediaRadar, YouTube lost 5% of its top advertisers in April 2017. In response, companies including M&S, HSBC, Lloyds, McDonald’s, RBS, L’Oreal, O2, BBC, Audi, Royal Mail and Domino’s stopped spending ad money on YouTube. In March 2017, one of the first major brand safety scandals occurred after some of the world’s biggest brands unknowingly funded terror groups by their ads appearing on the YouTube videos and websites of extremist organizations through programmatic methods. We will maintain our total planned media investment in the US by shifting to other media.” We will be monitoring ongoing and will revisit our current position if necessary. “Continuing to advertise on these platforms at this time would not add value to people and society. “Given our Responsibility Framework and the polarized atmosphere in the US, we have decided that starting now through at least the end of the year, we will not run brand advertising in social media newsfeed platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the US,” a Unilever spokesperson told me in a statement.

Target financial statements 2017 boycot