Recode: Apple Wrecked Facebook’s Ad Business with Commonsense Privacy Changes

In a recent article, Vox’s Recode outlines how Apple’s privacy update that allows users to prevent websites like Facebook from tracking them has had a massively negative effect on the social media giant’s revenue. Facebook (now Meta) relies on gaining access to the entire private lives of its users to appeal to advertisers, and Apple’s commonsense policies have caused major problems for Mark Zuckerberg and the Masters of the Universe.

Recode reports in an article titled “Apple Broke Facebook’s Ad Machine. Who’s Going to Fix it?” that Apple’s recently introduced iOS privacy updates have had a hugely negative effect on social media giant Facebook’s revenue.

Breitbart News previously reported that Facebook delivered an extremely poor earnings report to Wall Street earlier this month, which revealed that the company had lost daily active users for the first time ever, and resulted in the firm losing $250 billion of its value in a single day.

One of the key issues that investors focused on following the release of the earnings report was how badly Apple has hurt Facebook’s revenue with the introduction of its App Tracking Transparency feature that allows users to deny apps like Facebook the chance to track them across other apps and websites. This has cut into Facebook’s advertising business in a major way, costing Facebook around $10 billion this year alone according to the company’s earnings call.

Breitbart News reported in May 2021 that around 96 percent of iPhone users disabled Facebook’s ability to track them after the introduction of the update. Advertisers across multiple platforms reported drops in revenue of as much as 20 percent following the introduction of the feature.

Recode reports:

…Facebook is still making an enormous amount of money from advertising — analyst Michael Nathanson estimates the company will generate $129 billion in ad revenue in 2022. But that would mean its ad business will only grow about 12 percent this year, compared to a 36 percent increase the previous year. Wall Street has prized Facebook for its ability to grow at a rocket velocity, and now that rocket may be sputtering.

…

Facebook says it’s working on a fix to make things better for advertisers in the near term via an “aggregated event measurement” workaround. Which in plain English means that while it won’t be able to tell advertisers which individual users clicked on a link or downloaded an app after seeing an ad, it can tell them what a larger group of users did.

Depending on your perspective, that’s either a big improvement for users’ privacy or a large step backward for advertisers used to fine-grained accuracy on the internet. But both Google and Snap have rolled out similar products and have told investors they are working well-ish; Facebook executives concede that their version is not, yet; they think it will take months to get there.

Read more at Recode here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com