Your privacy cost Big Tech money this summer. But don’t worry, they still made billions and billions.
Over the past two weeks, Alphabet, Snap, Twitter, and Facebook — excuse me, Meta — shared with investors the incomprehensible amount of money they made last quarter. For all of these companies, that included slightly less revenue from advertisers because they had to adjust to a change in Apple’s policy, called App Tracking Transparency (ATT), that impacted apps’ ability to track users.
All in, the Financial Times reports that these four companies lost just under $10 billion in advertising bucks because of the change. Snap took the biggest hit proportionally: It says it lost out on $3 million, while still making over $1 billion.
“In the grand scheme of these multibillion-dollar companies, the impact of Apple’s privacy-protecting features is small but not insignificant,” Stephanie Liu, a marketing and privacy analyst at Forrester, said.
Google described its revenue loss on YouTube as “modest,” while Twitter said it was “pleased” by its ad performance. Meta’s Sheryl Sandberg said “the accuracy of our ads targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes for our advertisers.” Meanwhile, Facebook made $29 billion this summer.
There are a few reasons some companies felt the hurt more than others.
“Apple’s ATT specifically impacts advertisers’ ability to access a mobile device ID,” Liu said. “So the impact of ATT on these companies boils down to whether their userbase is accessing their services via mobile app, website, or both. Snap is very much a mobile-first product, which is why they suffered the most with ATT. While a lot of users check Twitter from their phones, there’s still a large userbase on desktop too, so the impact of ATT is lessened.”
Hooray for Twitter? It made nearly $1.3 billion. Small potatoes, though, compared to Alphabet’s $65.1 billion.
Apple’s changes mean apps have to ask permission before they can see what you’re doing on your iPhone beyond their own app. While monitoring our activity to more accurately/creepily advertise to us isn’t the hugest invasion of privacy in a world where law enforcement spies on peaceful protesters, preventing all-seeing ad-tracking is really the least Apple, and the rest of Big Tech, can do.
Besides, we’re sure they’ll find plenty of other ways to make up those bucks.
“We’re in a game of cat and mouse,” Liu said. “Apple decides it won’t support third-party cookies, or won’t freely give access to device IDs, and marketers and adtech companies try to find loopholes. Apple closes those loopholes. And around and around we go.”
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