SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – Shared.com is suing Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, claiming it violated the terms of an agreement to advertise on the social media platform.
Lawyers for Shared.com filed the case April 15 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming the company wasted millions of dollars to perfect its strategy for using Facebook to drive traffic to its websites.
From 2006-20, Shared spent $53 million on Facebook advertising, leading to 25 million followers on its sites’ pages. The company also spent $3.5 million developing tools and systems to optimize its ad spending.
“On April 24, 2018, Shared first lost ad monetization within the Instant Articles monetization feature of the Facebook Audience network, preventing Shared from generating revenue through that feature,” the suit says.
“Despite the contractual requirement that Facebook use ‘good faith efforts’ to provide Shared with notice if it discontinued Shared’s use of the Instant Articles monetization feature, Facebook provided no advance notice.”
Access was reinstated but revoked more times in the following years, the suit says, ultimately leading to the loss of all of its followers.
“When Facebook unpublished the shared pages, it effectively gave Shared a death sentence within the Facebook ecosystem,” the suit says.