Here’s how much Bloomberg spent on Facebook ads

Anybody got a lighter? Mike Bloomberg’s got some cash he wants to light on fire.

On Wednesday, following a Super Tuesday in which Bloomberg’s astronomical self-funded campaign failed to buy him voters, the campaign announced that it would suspend Bloomberg’s presidential campaign. 

The cost to Bloomberg for holding out as long as he did was advertisers’ gain. That includes Facebook, which infamously continued to allow political ads — including those with misleading information — when most other social media platforms pulled out of the practice altogether. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the social media giant earned $8 million from Bloomberg in the past week alone, and has raked in over $63 million in ads from Bloomberg’s page since 2018.

The Bloomberg campaign’s most recent Federal Election Commission filings show that Bloomberg spent over $409 million through January 2020. Additional reports move that figure to more than $500 million through February, until Super Tuesday on March 3.

A huge chunk of that change — 70 percent, according to the New York Times — has gone toward advertising. Traditional TV ads saw the biggest windfall from Bloomberg’s folly, pulling in about $130 million from 2019 through the end of January 2020. That doesn’t mean digital advertisers, including Facebook and Google, didn’t also profit from Bloomberg’s expensive ego trip. 

The FEC has not released its February disclosures yet, so there is a bit of a gap in our exact knowledge of Bloomberg’s spending. However, between the FEC stats through January, and Facebooks’ advertising archive — a public tool that aggregates ads posted to Facebook and Instagram and tabulates total ad spends — it’s possible to get a pretty good picture. 

According to Bloomberg’s FEC filings, the campaign spent $35,348,000 on Facebook ads through January 31, 2020. That doesn’t include the cool $8 million Bloomberg spent in the last week before Super Tuesday (or the intervening weeks in February, for which we don’t have exact figures). 

By comparison, in the Ad Library, in that same pre-Super Tuesday week, Bernie Sanders’ campaign spent $1 million on Facebook ads, Joe Biden’s clocked in at $900,000, and Elizabeth Warren’s made a showing with around $500,000. In just one week, Bloomberg outspent his competitors between eight and 16 times on Facebook.

Facebook wasn’t the only tech giant to make a few million from Bloomberg. Google also did not suspend political advertising. Instead, in November 2019, it changed the rules to restrict certain types of targeting on the basis of characteristics like age, gender, political affiliation, and voting records. The FEC filings show that Bloomberg handed some $15.9 million to Google. 

Not too shabby.

Facebook has said that it continues to allow political ads on its platform to expose people to information and allow them to decide on its veracity themselves. It says political ads are not a significant money-making endeavor. Indeed, Facebook announced that it made $21 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2019. During the same time period, Bloomberg spent $8 million at Facebook. That accounts for 0.04 percent of Facebook’s piggy bank.

How is a human supposed to process the extent and significance of that amount of cash? Does the relative value of $8 million to $20 billion not make the millions burned on advertising (to the profit of the platforms where the ads appear) significant? That’s still more cash in a corporation’s pocket, and Bloomberg still has $49.5 billion of his own money to spare. It’s all monopoly money at this scale, except to most people, it really isn’t.