Marketers are cutting back on ad spending due to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency privacy framework that gave users their privacy back, but also have made it harder to track and target new customers online, in a growing trend that has cost privacy-trampling platforms like Facebook billions of dollars.
Patrick Mcgee for Financial Times (via Ars Technica):
Many small companies that are reliant on online ads to attract new customers told the Financial Times they did not initially notice the full impact of Apple’s restrictions until recent months, when price inflation squeezed consumer demand in major markets worldwide.
That has left companies suddenly shrinking their marketing spend to conserve cash while also finding it prohibitively expensive to target likely consumers as they once did.
Facebook, Snap, Twitter, and YouTube are now estimated to lose $18 billion in revenues this year from Apple’s change, according to Lotame, the advertising technology company. Facebook’s parent Meta has been particularly badly hit, saying earlier this year that Apple’s changes had cost it at least $10 billion…
Last month, Snap reported its weakest-ever quarterly sales growth, Shopify laid off 10 percent of its workforce, Meta experienced its first-ever annual contraction in revenues and Twitter posted a loss.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in February:
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
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I believe Apple is doing this for user privacy about as much as the Democrats are spending 87 BILLION DOLLARS on new IRS agents to “lower inflation” and “Help us spend less time on hold.” Knock out the competition and certain revenue streams will increase.
https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/data/en/apple-advertising/
Agreed, Apple cares so much about your privacy from marketers but is non-stop scheming to scan all of your photos for thought crimes. Watch them flip the switch on that travesty any day now, if they haven’t been surveilling us for a long time already…
That’s the thing that really irks me about Apple. They are never consistent.
Apple privacy in two different compartments, well played.
Suspect the switch may have been flipped, at least partially. When I swipe right the screen on my iPhone shows a different picture (top) from my Photos Album daily. I did not ask them to post my pictures and ticked off they do it for me without permission. Unless its buried in the lawyerly Terms nobody reads.
But more importantly, have a few naughty photos and while none have shown up on the same screen thus far, makes me suspect either they are already looking at my photos, or they have an algorithm looking at my photos.
Either way, or another way, the practice is unacceptable…