On Wednesday, Facebook owner Meta Platforms posted disastrous quarterly results, blaming privacy safeguards for users from Apple (App Tracking Transparency) that made it tougher for advertisers.
“Facebook continues to see that impact of what it means to be built on top of Apple,” [Gene Munster of investment firm Loup Ventures] said, noting that Apple’s privacy changes have had a bigger impact on Facebook than he expected.
Meta’s revenue and forecast misses sent the social media company’s shares down 20% in after-hours trade on Wednesday, upending a sector-wide positive outlook on the results from Apple and Alphabet. The after-hours slump in Meta shares vaporized $200 billion worth of its market value, and peers Twitter Inc, Snap Inc, and Pinterest Inc saw $15 billion in lost value.
Scott Kessler of Third Bridge [said that] Apple’s change to its operations system in the middle of last year, said, would hit much of the mobile advertising world in 2022.
Apple allowed users to block some tracking of their internet use, which has made it harder for brands to target and measure their ads on Facebook and Instagram, which is also owned by Meta. Meta CFO David Wehner said on a conference call with analysts that the impact from Apple’s privacy changes could be “in the order of $10 billion” for 2022.
While Meta said macroeconomic issues like supply-chain disruptions and inflation contributed to the earnings miss, factors which could have far-reaching effects, analysts and investors focused their punishment on social media.
“I don’t think it turns around the current relief rally we are seeing in the tech space,” said analyst Robert Pavlik of Dakota Wealth Management, after Meta’s results. But there could be an impact on some advertising-supported companies, he said.
MacDailyNews Take: Good.
The online advertising market will have to adjust. People, for the most part, don’t want to be tracked by advertisers.
If advertisers want to reach prospective customers, the old way – that preserves user privacy – still works: You can find them by interest on sites that focus on specific topics. (Hint, hint.)
The fact that Apple’s giving people the choice to be tracked or not via App Tracking Transparency hurts Facebook et al. not only highlights the inherent flaw in the business model of these societal cancers, it makes us laugh. 🤣
All of these “social media” platforms – Twitter, Parler, Facebook – are cancers on society. They are clearly eating society from the inside out. There’s something unsavory within human nature that “digital distance” amplifies to the point of disgust.
If you quit these cancers you will quickly realize what they are and what they do. You will be happier and healthier to have excised them from your life.
We haven’t had personal Twitter or Facebook accounts for many years now. And very happily so. — MacDailyNews, January 9, 2021
Facebook is to privacy as Chernobyl is to nuclear power. — MacDailyNews, February 3, 2021
As I’ve said before, if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, we lose so much more than data, we lose the freedom to be human… If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, it does not deserve our praise, it deserves reform… Too many are still asking the question, “how much can we get away with?” when they should be asking “what are the consequences?” – Apple CEO Tim Cook, January 2021
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SSNs
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don’t know why.
Zuckerberg: They “trust me”
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
(Instant messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg during Facebook’s early days, reported by Business Insider in May 2010.)
If you trust Mark Zuckerberg to be the keeper of your photos, contacts, political views, religious beliefs, etc., you’re batshit insane. — MacDailyNews, May 23, 2018
We use FaceBook as an RSS feed. Our CMS automatically reposts our article headlines and links them back to our website. That is our only interaction with Facebook and has been our only interaction with Facebook for years. We deleted our personal accounts [which we opened only so we could understand the Facebook phenomenon] many years ago.
If you want to share photos and videos with friends, text them using Apple’s end-to-end encrypted iMessage service. You need to control your social networking, not cede it to a gatekeeper like Facebook. – MacDailyNews, March 19, 2018
As we’ve said many times: Delete Facebook.
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Shop The Apple Store at Amazon.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer source of disinformation.
A very well understated one-liner of truth and humor. (And I’ll add, with a fine, fine haircut that has to be related to the 20% drop in some way.)
Too many friends and family on Facebook to delete unfortunately. But this is good news. Maybe if someone followed Zuckerberg around and posted all the things he buys, all the places he visits, things he looks at, times he does stuff, etc., he might get it. Doubt it, but it might be fun 🙂
Besides the poor results announced this week, a more material “drop” is FB/Meta’s pulling out/away from their digital coin project Diem/Libra. Imagining such a company having any direct control of a currency–digi, or not–is terrifying to this person.