Apple’s New Privacy Features Have Cost Facebook $10 Billion

Platforms like Facebook rely a lot on user data to sell targeted advertising. This data includes the things that you do online, the websites you browse, products you’re looking at, and so on. This is why you can imagine that Facebook wasn’t too thrilled when Apple launched new privacy measures that essentially blocks these types of tracking.

The company had stated back then that they expected it would cost them in terms of advertising revenue, and it turns out that they were right. According to Facebook’s latest earnings, the company revealed that they had managed to earn $33.67 billion in revenue. This is higher than expected, but the company warned that for the first quarter of 2022, they expect its earnings to drop to around $27-$29 billion.

According to Meta’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, they are pretty much laying the blame on Apple. “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.”

We suppose this shouldn’t really come as a surprise since we imagine that most users would opt to stop apps from tracking them, so unless Meta finds a workaround, this could end up posing a huge problem for the company.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, General
Tags: Facebook, iOS, Privacy