Facebook issued a ban to its advertising agencies, asking them to suspend all advertisements for certain kinds of Chinese utility apps.
Facebook said that recently they found many irregularities from Chinese tool and utility app advertisers. Therefore, the company decided to suspend all advertisements for Chinese tool apps and the major focuses are apps related to smartphone clean-up, memory reclamation, and battery optimization. The company claimed that many of these advertisements deceived users, for example, by telling them their phone storage is full when it actually is not.
Facebook made a clear requirement to its advertising agencies to ask them to suspend all ads about clean-up and battery apps; otherwise, the agencies would be included in a blacklist.
According to Facebook's financial report for the fourth quarter of 2016, the company's advertising income from Asia Pacific was USD1.337 billion, accounting for 15.49% of its total advertising income in the quarter. The suspension may impact the company's forward revenue.
Meanwhile, it will bring negative influence to the overseas competitiveness of Chinese apps. Over the past few years, Chinese tool apps claiming to be battery doctors, anti-virus software, and input methods, gained good performance in the overseas market. Apart from Google Play and App Store, Facebook is also an important promotion channel for those apps.