Maya Robertson
According to an investigation by the Financial Times, Apple’s privacy changes have caused social media companies such as Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to lose about $9.85 billion.
The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy, which Apple first announced last year and went into effect in April, requires developers to ask users for permission to track them and to summarize their privacy information.
The report finds that Facebook lost the most money in “absolute terms” compared to other social platforms due to its huge size. Meanwhile, Snap “fared the worst as a percentage of business” as its ad business is mainly tied to mobile devices.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg said in a conference call that Facebook experienced revenue headwinds in the third quarter due to Apple’s ATT. The company’s Q3 revenue topped $29 billion, up 35% year-over-year, but fell short of analysts’ expectations.
Facebook has been one of the companies that criticizes Apple privacy changes the most since the first time it was announced. The company even launched an ad campaign against it in March.
According to a recent research, after Apple’s ATT went into effect, Apple Search Ads (ASA) surpassed Facebook, always the leading force in iOS, in power and volume rankings.
Snap Inc. also announced last week that Apple’s App Store privacy changes had caused the company to fail to meet revenue expectations for its third quarter. The social media company said revenue was $1.07 billion, up 57% for the three months ending Sept. 30, slightly below analysts’ expectations
“Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT,” Eric Seufert told FT. “My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”
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