Big Tech made a lot of money this summer by stealing your privacy. They still made billions and trillions.
Alphabet and Snap, Twitter, Facebook, and Meta all shared with investors the staggering amount of money that they have made in the last quarter over the past two weeks. All of these companies saw slightly lower revenue from advertisers due to a change to Apple's policy called App Tracking Transparency. (ATT). This changed Apple's ability to track users.
The Financial Times reports that these companies have lost less than $10 billion in advertising dollars due to the change. Snap suffered the largest proportional loss: Snap claims it lost $3 million but still made over $1 billion.
Stephanie Liu, Forrester's marketing and privacy analyst, stated that Apple's privacy-protecting features are not significant in the context of multibillion-dollar businesses.
Google called YouTube's revenue loss "modest," but Twitter claimed it was pleased with its ad performance. Sheryl Sandberg, Meta's Meta's spokesperson, stated that "the accuracy in our ads targeting declined" which led to higher costs for advertisers. Facebook earned $29 billion in this summer.
There are several reasons why some companies feel the pain more than others.
Liu stated that Apple ATT has a direct impact on advertisers' ability to access a mobile ID. The impact of ATT on these businesses boils down to their users accessing their services via a mobile app, website or both. Snap is a mobile-first company, and that is why they were most affected by ATT. Although most users access Twitter via their smartphones, there is still a significant userbase who use Twitter on their desktops, so the impact from ATT is diminished.
Twitter is a great success! It brought in nearly $1.3 billion. It is a small potato compared to Alphabet’s $65.1 billion.
Apple's new changes require apps to get your permission before they can view what you do on your iPhone. Although monitoring our activity to more accurately/creepily market to us isn’t the biggest invasion of privacy, it is the least Apple and Big Tech can do.
We're certain they will find other ways to make the money.
Liu stated, "Were playing a game with cat and mouse." Apple decides not to support third-party cookies or refuses to allow access to device IDs. Marketers and adtech firms try to find loopholes. Apple closes these loopholes. "And so we go."
