How well is Facebook doing around the world? So well, apparently, that advertisers from at least one country are buying ads even though its own citizens can't see them.
While Facebook has pushed efforts to help more Indians get access to the Internet in India, the company's service has been blocked in China for years.
"You can't have a mission to want to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call today after the company reported its third-quarter earnings. "Over the long term that is a situation that we will need to try to figure out a way forward on."
But Zuckerberg also said Facebook is in China in ways that we might not think about. "For now, the thing that I would leave you with—people think Facebook isn't in China at all, and that's actually not true. Our consumer service isn't active there, but it actually is already one of the biggest advertising markets that we have," he said.
"Because there are a lot of really big and important Chinese companies who sell a lot of products to people outside of China—and they use Facebook as one of their primary tools in a lot of cases to spread information about what they're doing and grow their customer base," he said.
Zuckerberg did not elaborate on the kinds of Chinese companies that have advertised on Facebook. But it's revealing that in even the places that Facebook's consumer products don't have a presence, the company still has its eyes set on how it can expand. After all, Facebook's business is built on ads. The only question is when Facebook will finally be available to users in China, too.
