In a blog post on Tuesday, Facebook said it now has two million active advertisers. According to Reuters, this is a 33% increase from the 1.5 million it had in July 2014. “The vast majority of the advertisers, defined as those that have placed an ad on the social media platform in the last 30 days, represent small- and medium-sized business owners,” the news service reported.

In November, 2013, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said the social networking site had 20 million “Business Pages,” created primarily by small businesses, but only had one million advertisers.

How Facebook Boosted its Number of Small Business Advertisers

As we explained at the time, last November (of 2014), Facebook announced a new policy that, in effect, means it no longer displays updates to a Business Page on the news feed of customers and others who have “Liked” or subscribed to the page. Facebook started requiring businesses to pay a toll for distributing updates to its Facebook fans to make sure “likers” would see posts. It doesn’t describe this toll as advertising (or toll). Instead, it uses the term, “Boost your Post.” However, such boosts waddle and quack like buying advertising, so call it what you want.

Here’s what I see when responding to the encouragement to boost a post on the SmallBusiness.com Facebook Page (we ocassionally experiment with Facebook ads).

If 1.5 million small businesses were advertising before November and 2 million are advertising now, it’s logical to attribute at least a part of the rapid 33% growth to Facebook’s “pay to play” policy of requiring small businesses to “boost posts” if they hope to be seen. (The number of people who see a post is displayed on the administrative page and it’s a small fraction of the number of people who have indicated they like the page.)

Today, tech and advertisng media have been quick to compare the Facebook advertiser numbers to Google’sw (also, mostly small businesses). According to Macquarie Research (via BusinessInsider.com), Google has four million advertisers, double that of Facebook.

However, before hanging too much importance on the “total Facebook advertisers” numbers, there are two missing data points necessary before one can do much meaningful “Facebook” vs. “Google” analysis: (1) Revenue per advertiser, and (2) How many small businesses are showing up as advertisers but have only used the “boost post” feature?