Facebook is still the most popular social media platform today, with around 2.9 billion monthly active users. It’s no wonder, then, that most of its revenue comes from advertising.
And this is what we’ll be looking at today – Facebook’s ad audience reach per country as of January 2023. Which are the countries with the highest ad reach, and why is that? Well, first things first, take a look at the chart below:
| Country | Ad Reach Percentage | Number of Facebook Users (As of 2022) | Facebook Users as % of the Total Population (As of 2022) |
| Libya | 96.1% | 5 million users | Over 73% |
| Mongolia | 94.1% | 2.5 million users | Over 73.5% |
| Philippines | 93.5% | 95.2 million users | Over 82% |
| U.A.E. | 88.9% | 8.14 million users | Over 86% |
| Peru | 86% | 21.22 million users | Over 64% |
| Georgia | 85.5% | 2.7 million users | Over 72%% |
| Ecuador | 85% | 12.7 million users | Over 70% |
| Qatar | 83.6% | 2.1 million users | Over 77% |
| Vietnam | 83.4% | 70.4 million users | Over 82.3% |
| Mexico | 82.7% | 90.21 million users | Over 68.9% |
| Cambodia | 82.6% | 11.6 million users | Over 69% |
| Aruba | 82.6% | 80,600 users | Over 75% |
| Tonga | 81.9% | 70,900 users | Over 66% |
| Greenland | 81.9% | 39,800 users | Over 70% |
| Faroe Islands | 80.1% | 34,900 users | Over 65% |
| Colombia | 79% | 32 million users | Over 62% |
| Bolivia | 78.7% | 8.5 million users | Over 70% |
| Iceland | 77.5% | 246,900 users | Over 64% |
| Thailand | 77.1% | 50 million users | Over 70% |
| Cayman Islands | 76.2% | 67,800 | Over 98% |
Now, you might be asking what audience ad reach is. Basically, it refers to the number of people in the audience who can see your marketing ad.
The higher the audience ad reach, the more money marketers can make off of them because the users are likely to buy something through those ads. This is what Facebook’s core business venture is based on, and it’s quite a brilliant plan.
In a country like Libya, Mongolia, or the Philippines, any marketer serving ads will likely obtain much more profits simply because a larger share of the population is looking at that ad.
How Is Facebook Making Money Off of Ads?
The business concept is pretty simple, actually. Facebook has access to billions of people worldwide in an instant. The platform connects all of those people into one single place.
Imagine what would happen if you put your ad on the platform and a share of that billion people saw the ad. How many will click on it and buy your product?
Do you see where I’m going with this? Marketers pay Facebook to have their ads put up on the platform so that Facebook’s users can see those ads and maybe buy something. Simply put, Facebook is using its user base to make money by serving them ads.
Facebook doesn’t make money from the ads directly but rather from the marketers who pay to get those ads on the platform.
And you can probably imagine exactly how profitable it is for Meta (Facebook’s parent company) to sell ad space for marketers.
To put things into perspective, Facebook made $113.6 billion in ad revenue in 2022.
Here’s another example – in Q2 2021 (April-June), Facebook made $29 billion in revenue. That comes up to:
- $319.6 million per day
- $13.3 million per hour
- $220,000 per minute
- $3,700 per second
And most of that money comes from marketers who want ad space. That’s quite the profitable venture, it appears.
Moreover, the more users Facebook has, the more money they’ll make off of ads. The model is basically scalable up to infinity. The only thing that could kill Facebook’s ad revenue was:
- If Zuckerberg shifts the company focuses on something like Virtual Reality (wait…)
- If online services and products disappear (quite impossible)
- If the company goes through a massive social drama that turns most of its users against it
So far, only one of those things appears to be happening, and the way I heard it, Zuckerberg is still going strong with the Metaverse.
So…
Based on Facebook’s audience ad reach in 2023, we can figure out which countries are the most profitable for marketers.
Moreover, it’s important to realize that the audience ad reach is not the same as the percentage of the population using Facebook.
What matter is what percentage of those Facebook users will look at your ad. That’s the audience ad reach. This becomes clear when you look at Libya’s 96.1% audience ad reach when only 73% of its population is using Facebook.
Sure, but 96.1% of those 73% will watch your ad, based on Facebook’s calculations. And that’s a pretty big thing since there are approximately 5 million users in Libya. This means that around 4.8 million people will see your ad.
I hope this article has been of some help to you, but if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments below!
