According to a report published by the Financial Times, Apple’s privacy changes cost Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube more than $9.85 billion in revenue. Last year, Apple implemented the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy requiring developers to obtain permission before monitoring users’ data. Apps are no longer allowed to track people who opt out of the policy’s application process starting April 1.
The Facebook acquisition of Instagram provoked a storm of criticism, and the reason for this is now clear. According to the report, Facebook incurred the most losses “in absolute terms” among other social networks due to its enormous size. Snap, on the other hand, fared the worst as a proportion of its business owing to its reliance on smartphones as an advertising medium; it makes sense given that there’s no desktop version.
“Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT,” adtech consultant Eric Seufert told FT. “My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”
Apple’s app tracking policy will change the advertising
Apple‘s new policy will force social networks and other software to get more innovative with their advertising. Whether it means focusing on Android devices or investing in Apple’s advertising business, which nearly broke its own rules by collecting user data in the same way third-party apps did, they’ll have to come up with another source of income.
