Facebook Reports Third Quarter 2020 Results [pdf]

Given how many spambots I come across on popular pages’ comment sections, and folks with a separate work account, I’m fairly skeptical on those numbers.

This includes any person who visits a website that has a facebook tracking pixel.

in their charts it explains this as follows:

Reflects a one-time income tax benefit of $913 million related to the effects of a tax election to capitalize and amortize certain research and development expenses for U.S. income tax purposes. Excluding this tax benefit, our effective tax rate would have been 11 percentage points higher in Q3 2020.

Also, Americans are wealthier on average. But I do wonder if Europe’s data regulations make it harder for Facebook to target ads as effectively in the EU...

Americans are somewhat wealthier than the average European but not by that margin. My guess is several things. European data protection is stricter so monetizing users is probably harder, but more importantly I'd say there is no unified market for advertisers. Europe has dozens of languages and different cultures that are much harder to serve with ads than you can in the United States.

I believe a greater percent of retail is online in the US than Europe. Generally it is easier for an e-commerce company to get their money back on an ad than a brick and morter store trying to advertise onlin.e

I think Americans in general buy a lot more stuff than Europeans. I think they are more susceptible to ads.

We manage a lot of social ads for brand in Germany, which is obviously the biggest EU market. It‘s mostly very slow adoption rate of new channels, so it‘s mostly lag. Additionally FB Sales internationally has been mostly horrible, so I think they just did a horrible job in their ad sales in Europe. OF course some parts of it like the split between digital and other channels is not only FB responsibility, but still... I think they are just horrible in this. I just had a client who invests Millions with Google every year and nothing with FB, there might be a good argument for let‘s say 60% Google or 90% Google but there is nor argument for 100%. So lag, less availability marketing budget on total and a stupid sales process.