During Facebook’s Q2 earnings call held earlier today, the company’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the most popular social network on the planet will soon attempt to break into the search advertising market. That’s right, Google might be getting some worthy competition after more than a decade and a half of absolute market dominance. Even though Facebook itself has been developing a search engine for years and despite the fact that the said engine is actually actively used by the social network, the company behind it never tried to monetize it like Google has been doing with AdWords since the turn of the century.
Well, that’s apparently going to change in the near future. Zuckerberg revealed that search advertising is a business path that Facebook will likely take in the future after it commences the so-called “stage three” of the project. As Facebook’s founder put it, every Facebook product goes through three stages. The first one is basically getting users acquainted with the new technology. The second phase encompasses tweaking the product in order to make it useful to businesses on a natural or organic level, while the final, third stage denotes starting to charge those same businesses for benefiting from the product. Zuckerberg himself believes that the Facebook search is currently nearing the end of its second phase and will soon be ready for turning into a money-making machine, not at all unlike Google Search. The famous entrepreneur didn’t give a specific launch window during which he expects Facebook to start making money from its search engine, but the wording of his reveal suggests we’ll have more information on the matter sooner rather than later.
Facebook’s CEO also didn’t go into any detail regarding how exactly the company is planning to monetize its ever-evolving search engine, though it’s to be presumed Facebook will try to do something similar to Google and at least partially sell promoted search results. Given how the social network just reported that it has over 1.13 billion of monthly active users, that’s a lot of people who are using its search engine and would potentially see promoted content within its results. Regardless of how (un)successful Facebook’s upcoming search advertising venture ends up being, one thing is certain – the endeavor will definitely raise stakes in the never-ending rivalry between Facebook and Google even further seeing how search advertising is the latter’s bread and butter.