Facebook’s Apology Over ‘Marketplace’ Mishaps, Service’s Potential $5B Revenue

Facebook recently opened the service called “Marketplace” to make selling through their social media platform a lot easier. However, some questionable offers started popping up as a result of the feature’s introduction, which included drugs and sex. Facebook has since apologized for the mishap involving the service, which some analysts are estimating will be worth $5 billion to the social media site.

Within hours of Facebook being made aware that its “Marketplace” feature was hosting products and services that were in blatant violation of its policies, the social network apologized to customers, CNN reports. Aside from the unbelievable offers that included the sale of infants and cannabis, others were selling beer for $25 a can and a 6 oz. bottle of water without the bottle for $56.

The absurd nature of these products makes them easily dismissible as jokes, but Facebook was still inclined to take them seriously. The social network blamed the mishap on supposed “technical issues” without elaborating on what these issues were. Facebook did say that it created a bug, which then crippled its review system.

As a result of the rampant spread of unmoderated posts, “Marketplace” is temporarily shut down. Facebook will be bringing the service back up once they’ve found a fix for the problem. They might have an incentive to do so quickly as well since Seeking Alpha estimated that the feature can be worth a lot of money to them.

The site points to the significant growth of a thriving community of buyers and sellers on the social media platform thanks to its buy-and-sell group feature. With over 450 million monthly participants conducting transactions on a peer-to-peer basis, the users basically laid the groundwork for “Marketplace” to finally take hold.

Facebook had actually tried to launch an earlier version of the service back in 2007, but it didn’t succeed due to the competition. EBay and other sites simply had a much larger pool of customers, which made them the logical choice for aspiring entrepreneurs. Nine years and 1.7 billion users later, it’s clear that Facebook now has the advantage in numbers.