As many of you probably know, Facebook was a loud critic of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature upon its announcement and release, and that has, surprise, surprise, a reason. In 2021, Facebook lost some money due to those privacy features, and the social media giant might lose an estimated $12.8 billion just because of ATT.
App Tracking Transparency was launched back with iOS 14 in April of 2021, and it is a very useful privacy-related feature for iPhones. What it does is prevent third-party tracking to occur (of course, if you choose not to be tracked, which is what the majority of iPhone users chose anyway). This way, an app such as Facebook cannot track your activity online so that it can serve you with relevant ads.
And Facebook has seen the impact of this. Almost 12 months after Apple’s launch of ATT, a new analyst now predicts the second year will cause major disruption to advertisers. Companies that rely on advertising, including Facebook, YouTube, and others, are estimated to collectively lose around $16 billion because of the feature.
Towards the end of last year, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reported the company would potentially see a $10 billion revenue hit for 2022. Well, it seems this number may be a bit higher, at least according to an analysis by research firm Lotame.
Despite that, Apple doesn’t wish death upon all advertisers, so the company introduced new frameworks to help advertisers, but this time, no personal tracking is used and the data is aggregated. This way, less relevant ads could be served to users.
The report continues on to say that the collective impact for companies would be nearly $16 billion, and the company that’s going to lose the most is Facebook with an around 81% share of those $16 billion. Other companies expected to lose revenue are Snap, which could lose around $545 million, then Twitter with around $323 million. YouTube is also on the list of impacted companies, and there, the estimated revenue loss is around $2.2 billion.
Pretty large sums, we might add. Interestingly enough, these sums represent in fact how much those companies and apps were actually relying on tracking you on the internet…
The report also indicates that both Snap and Twitter have been quickly adapting to the situation, including using the new measurement systems provided by Apple, and these two companies don’t seem too troubled with it.
Facebook has also stated that it will work to decrease its reliance on Apple. Earlier, the social media giant stated that it will look into other ways that advertisers can profit.
But Apple’s App Tracking Transparency impact, at least according to the analysts, is going to decrease by the second half of 2022, and “other shocks” are expected to affect the advertising industry, but the report doesn’t delve into details on that.
Facebook seems to have suffered the most from Apple’s ATT. You may remember earlier when Meta’s stock price drastically fell after Zuckerberg’s report on the revenue of the company and ATT. For those of you who are curious, currently, Meta’s share price sits at $214.99 (at the time of writing), dropping down from around $323 in February 2022 (before the report came out).
