It would seem that the old adage is true: if you aren’t paying for something valuable, then the product is you.
The Financial Times have crunched the numbers and found that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube lost a collective A$13.1 billion in revenue since Apple tightened its privacy policies in April.
The App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy requires apps to ask users for permission to track their data, a practice that, while horribly invasive, also happens to be the business model for most of these social media platforms.
Facebook published the below double-page ad in a number of dailies to paint itself as defender of the little guy, which is hilarious for numerous reasons.app
Facebook lost the most actual money, while Snap were impacted the most in terms of a percentage of its business, due to its reliance on smartphones.
“Some of the platforms that were most impacted — but especially Facebook — have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT,” adtech consultant Eric Seufert told FT.
“My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users.”
