Reuters file photo
Doha: Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature is costing social media giants including Facebook billions in revenue. The crackdown by apple on tracking has made it difficult for companies like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Snapchat track user and deliver targeted advts.
The company introduced the App Tracking Transparency feature in iOS 14.5 to stop developers from tracking users across websites and other apps.
As per a report by Lotame, Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature could cost the big corporations almost $16 billion in 2022. Facebook is expected to take the biggest hit, with an estimation of $12.8 billion loss in revenue. That is followed by YouTube’s $2.1 billion estimation.
“The effects of these changes on these companies are hard to isolate because all four players are still growing extremely strongly, still taking share from the last bastions of traditional media and gaining share in digital media as privacy regulations make it harder and harder for independent publishers and technologies to execute. To add to the complexity, the pandemic has introduced volatile and unpredictable gyrations in the pacing of media spend,” Mike Woosley, Chief Operating Officer of Lotame said.
Facebook validated this on its Q4 earnings call with CFO David Wehner saying “…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. And we’re seeing that impact in a number of verticals. E-commerce was an area where we saw a meaningful slowdown in growth in Q4.”
To ensure that developers don’t tempt users into allowing app tracking, Apple’s App Store guidelines ban offering users perks or rewards for enabling the feature. Additionally, iOS offers a toggle that stops apps from prompting you to enable app tracking altogether.
The social media giants are now finding ways to deliver advts through other means without trackingthe user.
