It was no secret that Apple’s privacy measures on iOS upset Facebook and now the extent of the damage Apple inflicted on the social media giant: $10 billion this year alone.
Facebook spent a lot of time last year complaining about Apple’s upcoming iOS update, which asks users for permission to track them across other apps and websites and easily lets them opt out.
With their main business being tracking users across the web to serve more relevant ads, Apple’s privacy initiative, the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, cut deep into Facebook’s bottom line.
” First, ads. Like others in our industry, we’ve faced headwinds as a result of Apple’s iOS changes. 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,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, during the latest earnings call.
He was backed up by Facebook’s chief financial officer, David Wehner, who revealed the $10 billion loss.
“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,” he said, accusing Apple afterwards of favoring Google with their policies.
“So when it comes to using data, you can think of it — that it’s not really apples-to apples for us. And as a result, we believe Google’s search ads business could have benefited relative to services like ours that face a different set of restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue,” he explained.
“So when it comes to using data, you can think of it — that it’s not really apples-to apples for us. And as a result, we believe Google’s search ads business could have benefited relative to services like ours that face a different set of restrictions from Apple. And given that Apple continues to take billions of dollars a year from Google Search ads, the incentive clearly exists for this policy discrepancy to continue,” he explained.
During the same earnings call, it was also the first time in its history that Facebook didn’t report a growth of daily active users (DAUs). In the last quarter of 2021, there were 1.93 billion registered DAUs as compared to 19.5 billion from the previous quarter.
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