Facebook’s battle with fake news will affect its revenues.

We have already discussed the intentions of Facebook to eliminate the distribution of fake news in our previous article. This one will focus on the Facebook’s revenues more as the problem appeared to be more serious than it seemed.

A CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook will do its best to protect its users from the false news, despite the revenue losses it might suffer: “I want to be clear about what our priority is. Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits.” We think that Facebook users will be pleased by such claim, as according to statistics, about 66 percent of users see fake news on Facebook at least once a week.

One of the solutions Facebook will implement is that it will increase the number of people in charge of safety and security by 20,000 and invest in engineering and technology expertise. Although analytics predict Facebook revenues to grow by 30 percent and reach $51 billion in 2018, it is probably a rash judgment. Firstly, because as we mentioned, the network will not allow buying advertising placements to the pages that spread fake news. Secondly, it will dedicate more sources to the ‘fight’ with false news and increase operating expenses by 60 percent.

Currently, Facebook, as most populated (2 billion monthly users) social media platform, is mostly used for advertising. Does it mean that above-mentioned policies will be likely to drive advertising revenues from Facebook to other platforms? Time will show..

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