Apple’s privacy measures have dire consequences: Facebook and its partners are €8.5 billion poorer

It is estimated that Facebook, Snap, Twitter and YouTube lost nearly $8.5 billion in ad revenue after Apple’s privacy changes in iPhones.

The transparency of tracking apps for iPhone, which Apple introduced last April, has shaken up the online advertising market. according to Financial Times business newspaper account Based on figures from ad tech company Lotame, major social media companies would have lost €8.5 billion in advertising money in six months as a result of this new setup in iPhones. This represents 12 percent of its turnover.

With the new privacy setting in iOS mobile, apps that wish to track their users must request explicit permission beforehand. A large percentage (80 percent) of iPhone users did not grant this permission, something Facebook previously feared. In previous versions of iOS, users could also choose not to be tracked by apps, but had to find this setting themselves (opt out). It happened much less.

meta effect

Meta, the new name of the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, among others, lost the most sales in absolute terms in two quarters: more than eight billion dollars. This represents 13.2 percent of its turnover. Facebook relies largely on its mobile apps: at least 90 percent of the ad money earned comes from there. In Snap, this dependency is larger. Here, almost all revenue comes from mobile devices. With that in mind, iPhones save 42 percent of the money earned, Lotame estimates.

Since companies like Facebook and Snap now know so little about their users (are they male or female, are they interested in BMWs?), they can make advertisers less accurate in targeting their target audience. As a result, these ads are less effective. As a result, many advertisers will spend a dollar elsewhere and ignore Facebook and Snap. Notaben Apple itself will benefit from this development: its advertising activities have recently made more money. Another shift towards TikTok, among others, which has much lower ad rates.

Privacy as a human right

Compared to Snap and Meta, Twitter and YouTube are less affected by Apple’s interference, the business newspaper estimates. On Twitter, that’s because this company relies less on personalized advertising. In any case, YouTube’s parent company (Alphabet) can take a beating. This company also collects a lot of user data across all Google apps and is therefore less dependent on the explicit permission of iPhone users.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also denied last week that Apple had made the changes for financial reasons, something that some critics as well as the Facebook company accuse: “We are convinced that privacy is a fundamental human right. And that’s our only motivation.”