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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