Facebook says the impact of Apple’s ATT on its revenue in 2022 will be around $10 billion

Meta, formerly Facebook, posted its fourth quarter earnings Wednesday. For the fourth quarter of 2021, Meta beat analysts’ expectation in ad revenue at $33.67 billion, but missed the top end of its guidance from the last quarter’s earnings call. 

Meta CFO Dave Wehner said on the earnings call that  Apple’s App Tracking Transparency will decrease the company’s sales in 2022 by about $10 billion. 

“We believe the impact of iOS overall as a headwind on our business in 2022 is on the order of $10 billion, so it’s a pretty significant headwind for our business.” Wehner said. 

In the Q3 conference call Mark Zuckerberg had said Facebook experienced revenue headwinds in the quarter due to Apple’s ATT. The company’s Q3 revenue had topped $29 billion, up 35% year-over-year, but fell short of analysts’ expectations.

Meta said its first-quarter 2022 revenue would be $27 billion to $29 billion, with analysts expecting that figure to exceed $30 billion.

Wehner said the $10 billion hit in revenue this year is merely a best guess.

“We’re just estimating what we think is the overall impact of the cumulative iOS changes to where the 2022 revenue forecast is,” Wehner said. “If you aggregate the changes that we’re seeing on iOS, that’s the order of magnitude. We can’t be precise on this. It’s an estimate.”

Facebook’s daily active users fell slightly over the fourth quarter from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion. 

Facebook’s daily active users, on the other hand, saw a slight decrease from Q3 to Q4, reaching 1.929 billion. 

Facebook’s operating chief Sheryl Sandberg said: “As we described last quarter, Apple created two challenges for advertisers. One is that the accuracy of our ads targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes. The other is that measuring those outcomes became more difficult.” 

“These challenges are complex and interrelated. We’re working to try and improve things, for example by making progress in closing the underreporting gap for iOS web conversions, and by introducing tools like our Aggregated Events Measurement solution to deliver better insights for advertisers. These efforts will help to mitigate some of the challenges, but we expect the overall targeting and measurement headwinds to moderately increase from Apple’s changes and from regulatory changes in Q1 and throughout 2022.”