With iOS 14.5, released in April, Apple introduced theApp Tracking Transparency (ATT), a function that guarantees the user greater control over their data, allowing them to give or deny consent to tracking for advertising purposes. The choice, much appreciated by consumers, however, has damaged the third-party apps involved. Specifically we are talking about a $ 9.85 billion loss for Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the middle of 2021 alone.
This was revealed by the Financial Times based on data collected by Lotame which estimates a loss of 12% for the companies involved in the third and fourth quarters.
Apple and ATT: how much does user privacy cost?
10 billion dollars. So this is it the cost of user privacy on iOS although some experts think Lotame’s assessment is rather conservative. Eric Seufert, Adtech consultant, said the figures should be much higher, with a loss of 8.3 billion dollars for Facebook alone.
“Some platforms, the ones that have been most affected like Facebook, will have to rebuild their system from scratch due to ATT – said Seufert in an interview – I think it will take at least a year to create the new infrastructure. In fact, new tools and new frameworks will be needed that will not only have to be built from scratch but also tested before the official launch. “
All this, you can imagine, depends on the choice made by users with the release of iOS 14.5: in the United States, only 4% of iPhone owners have given consent to be tracked by applications. This, of course, does not mean that these users do not see any type of advertising but that the different platforms do not have the necessary data to advertise targeted. All this has led companies to invest less on platforms such as Snap, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube or even to abandon them in favor of other services.
“We began to see the impact of ATT in Q2 with a surge in late June and reaching critical mass in Q3,” he explained recently. Sheryl Sandberg, COO di Facebook – As a result, we faced two different challenges. The first is there less accuracy, which has led to an increase in costs for advertisers. The second challenge is that measuring results has become much more difficult. “
However, Zuckerberg’s company doesn’t seem to have felt the pinch considering the variety of activities and platforms at their disposal. We cannot say the same thing when talking about Snap, owner of the Snapchat app. The shares of the Californian company in fact fell by 25%, a fall that the company has attributed as much to the ATT as to the shortage of electronic materials that has long been undermining the stability of our economy.