Number of Advertisers on Facebook (2016–2020)
As the most popular social media platform, competition on Facebook is undoubtedly fierce. The billions of consumers using the platform offer immense opportunities for brands to grow, and all businesses worldwide are itching to get their hands on a slice of this pie.
With so many eyes on Facebook, it’s no wonder it ranks as the top social media marketing platform among businesses. Ads also make up a big majority of Facebook’s revenue. In Q3 2023, 98.5% (or $33.6 billion) of the $34.1 billion revenue the company generated in the quarter came from ads.
In order to know how to make your Facebook ads stand out, you need to understand the landscape, starting with the number of advertisers on Facebook.
Recent research data shows that the number of Facebook advertisers has been increasing steadily over the past few years. According to the latest numbers, as of the third quarter of 2020, as many as ten million active advertisers were using Facebook to sell and promote their products. Statistics show that small and medium-sized businesses make up the majority of these advertisers.
Not only was this a whopping one million more than the previous quarter, but it also marked the highest number of advertisers on Facebook ever recorded.
The number of Facebook advertisers has increased tremendously in recent years. In fact, at the start of 2016, there were just three million active advertisers on Facebook. By the third quarter that year, it had increased one-third to four million. Just a year later in Q3 2017, the number of Facebook advertisers had doubled to six million.
This figure held steady until the start of 2019 when it rose to seven million. According to research on 2019 data, the top 100 businesses (in terms of ad spend) spent $4.2 billion on Facebook advertising, which came up to about six percent of the platform's ad revenue.
The number of Facebook advertisers ballooned in 2020, increasing by two million in as many quarters. According to analysts, this jump was driven by a high demand by advertisers and the pivot from brick-and-mortar shopping to ecommerce as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
In less than five years, the number of advertisers has more than tripled, with faster growth seen over the past few quarters.
