Paid advertisements on Facebook
Fatwa No: 290566

Question

asalam we3likoummy question is about advertising online or offline for example I have a product and I am going to advertise it on social media online or other websites or newspapers or magazines, the process is like that I pay for example 20 dollars a day in facebook advertisement (the higher budget you set in advertising the higher impressions and viewers you get and also the priority over the other advertisers it is called bidding, it is an auction) to reach 1000 or less or whatever numbers of impressions a day or there is the other way in facebook advertisement also which is you pay per clicks I mean every time someone who clicks on my advertisement the click would cost me 1 dollars or more but the more I have clicks of people the price of click would decrease because I would have a high rate of click through rate and also there is another way which is called conversion rate advertising it means when someone clicks on your advertisement and buy your product you would pay the click that has the buyer bought your product through and another way which is you pay per viewers you pay money to reach a certain amount of views and the other question is advertising in websites or magazines or articles for that it is sometimes you buy a numbers of impression to reach people or you pay to place your advertisement in the website or in other words you rent a place in the website where you would advertise your product . so is this halal and permissible ? I mean is that GHARAR uncertainty ?

Answer

All perfect praise be to Allaah, The Lord of the Worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allaah, and that Muhammad, sallallaahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, is His Slave and Messenger.

You have included many questions in your inquiry; our system is to answer one of them and ask you to kindly resend the other questions each at a time. So we shall only respond to the first question in this Fatwa.

You asked about the permissibility of making a daily payment in return for advertising on Facebook, and whenever the advertiser wishes to increase the number of the viewers, he has to pay extra money to have the advertisement published on pages with many visitors (to increase the potential views of the Facebook ads). If this is what you mean, then there is no harm in that. The fact that the sum paid if the advertiser wants his advertisement to be published on pages with a greater number of visitors is larger does not have any effect on the permissibility of the transaction.

If this is not what you meant, then please clarify your question further so that we can answer it more specifically. Also, resend the rest of the inquiries each as individual questions.

Allaah Knows best.

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