Mobile app advertising on iOS has long relied on Apple's IDFA - Identifier for Advertisers - a random, device-unique, resettable identifier that was available to all apps.
An app like Candy Crush would tell ad networks like FB that "IDFA 123456 just installed the app" or "IDFA 654321 just made a $5 in-app purchase." FB could then recognize that IDFA as a user who installed the FB app, and they could use that data to target, optimize via ML, and measure the audience and results of Candy Crush's marketing campaign.
Apple's recent iOS update made IDFA an app-level opt-in, so in order for this existing advertising mechanism to work, you needed to opt-in to tracking on FB (so they could associate your IDFA to a FB user) AND to opt-in to tracking on the other apps (so they could send ad networks data with your IDFA). This double opt-in obviously has a super low rate.
FB wasn't impacted nearly as much as other advertising businesses because they already have identifiers for their users (email, phone number, etc), have a ton of first-party interest/behavioral data, and they mostly run ads on their own properties. Apps who used third-party ad networks to sell and place ads in their apps had their business completely destroyed.
I think this is all fair in terms of user choice and to give Apple control of their own platform, but it opens Apple up for a lot of regulatory scrutiny given that they were able to flip a switch that annihilated a $50b mobile advertising industry, while making their own equivalent data collection opt-out (vs their competitors' opt-in). Even then, Apple frames their data collection option as "Personalize your experience" while forcing other apps to use the phrase "Allow this app to track you." Apple's own ads product has tripled its market share since this launched. [0]
[0] https://www.ft.com/content/074b881f-a931-4986-888e-2ac53e286...
No, the phrase is “Allow AppName to track your activity across other companies’ apps and websites?”
Apple’s text says: “The Apple advertising platform does not track you. It is designed to protect your privacy and does not follow you across apps and websites owned by other companies.”
These are not equivalent, they are the opposite of one another; one is about tracking you across third-party apps and websites, whilst the other is about not tracking you across third-party apps and websites. Of course they need different descriptions.
> Apple’s advertising platform does not track you, meaning that it does not link user or device data collected from our apps with user or device data collected from third parties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes, and does not share user or device data with data brokers.
What Apple's advertising platform does do is personalize ads based on your keyboard language settings, device type, OS version, mobile carrier, connection type, device location if you've enabled Location Services and you've given permission to the App Store or Apple News apps, App Store search queries, and the type of news story you read.
In addition, Apple uses information "such as" the following specific features to assign you to an audience segment at least 5000 people in size:
- name, address, age, gender if you've disclosed it, and devices registered to your Apple ID account. If you didn't disclose your gender, "information such as your first name in your Apple ID registration page or salutation in your Apple ID account may be used to derive your gender."
- Music, movies, books, TV shows, and apps you download, as well as any in-app purchases and subscriptions. They don't allow targeting based on downloads of a specific app or purchases within a specific app (including subscriptions) from the App Store, unless the targeting is done by that app's developer, so that's nice, I guess.
- publications you follow, subscribe to, or enable notifications from
- How you actually interact with Apple ads (unclear if "interact" here is limited to view and click, or if they attribute downstream actions to their ads)
Notably, "No Apple Pay transactions or Health app data is accessible to Apple's advertising platform, or is used for advertising purposes."
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Granted, Apple doesn't use third-party data for "targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes," and they do not share your user or device data with "data brokers." I imagine not all users would agree that their ad personalization activity doesn't count as "tracking" in the practical sense.
Fuck them. Seriously. Bunch of parasites.
For Apple it's a win-win. Public gets more privacy and Apple nets a few billion dollars more in revenue in addition to anything additional generated by goodwill.
Facebook business was damaged when Apple introduced explicit opt-in request for third-party advertisement data collection.
Serious question: what exactly is "Apple's own ads product?" Where would I (as an Apple ecosystem user) encounter it?
[0] https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2019/11/IMG_0...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/poegzl/i_was_just_...
I create something that allows 3rd parties to build up an entire business model around it. One day, I decide to no longer offer/maintain/make viable that something. I'm supposed not be able to do that because a $50bn market built up around my work? No, I can do whatever I want because it's mine.
If 90%+ of users opt-out, perhaps the ad industry needs some introspection beyond our ability to opt-out.
There is an implicit but unsupported assumption in this statement that the advertising industry has a right to this data, and that taking it away from them is somehow wrong.
Cry me a river. This industry should maybe ask itself how it pays back an additional 50b to the users it spied on, which was allowed by Apple in the first place. Apple just corrected a mistake that shouldn't have happened in the first place. This is like being sued by your tumor for nutrient deficiency.
I understand that people dislike Apple basically abusing their market position to run their own data collection. Still not okay.
I think your significantly overestimating their impact as Android is obviously not impacted. At most they reduced but not eliminate the revenue from iOS advertising.
Whether you like or hate Facebook, it's hard to see Zuckerberg as anything but a failing CEO at this point. He continues to create problems which harms the Facebook brand. He has allowed the companys core product to be partly dependent on the actions of an unrelated company (Apple) who have a completely different business case and agenda. Either through action or inaction he is now forcing countries to start legislation to control companies like Facebook, well Facebook and Facebook companies. Despite all of that, I hear no critic of Zuckerberg as a CEO.
I am a consistent Facebook hawk. But to claim shareholders have done anything other than exceptionally well under Zuckerberg is to ignore the evidence. The stock is up. Buybacks are at a record. A $10bn capital spending programme was just announced.
Reminds me of the dot-com days when ordinary Joe boasted about the gains of their portfolio when, as it turned out, a monkey throwing darts at the financial page could pick as many winners.
Can I think Zuckerberg is a terrible CEO and not understand how his companys stock price isn't tanking due to mismanagement?
Is this something Facebook-specific, or are you suggesting that _every_ company currently making money on iOS is stupid (And presumably Android too, since you’re almost-equally screwed if Google decide they don’t like you)? If that’s the case, what do you suggest doing instead?
Apple has long been moving towards more privacy, so Facebook shouldn't have been upset that Apple is limiting tracking abilities. It should have been something Facebook saw coming and planned for years ago.
Someone did a very nice clone a few years ago of a Facebook UI done entirely in the browser and it was snappy even in lower tier androids.
It might be harder for other companies, eg games where you need native code to perform well but facebook really has no excuses. They were never going to benefit from walled gardens on mobile.
It could be that they lacked skills to optimise a web page, judging from how terrible and heavy their frontend apps are, but I think it was mostly a strategic decision to go native.
They tried to sell their own phones to not depend on Apple and Google. That did not work out because it turns out it's super hard. Now they are betting that the next platform is going to be VR/AR, a space where they are currently #1.
What else are you suggesting they do?
> it's hard to see Zuckerberg as anything but a failing CEO at this point
I think he's been doing a really great job. For instance everybody thought their acquisition of Instagram (led by Zuckerberg) was a waste of money at the time. In 2020 Instagram represented 37% of the group's total revenues (which includes Oculus, Whatsapp... and Facebook!).
> Despite all of that, I hear no critic of Zuckerberg as a CEO.
Your perception on both of these points is wildly out of whack from reality.
Al Franken was on CNN this morning and he was saying it's time for Zuckerberg to go. He blames a lot of Facebook's problem on Zuckerberg.
That's why they are building their own VR/AR platform.
Not doing that would leave money (lots of money, I would think) on the table, and would give the competition an opportunity.
Cross-app activity can't be tracked without this permission. So if you see an ad for a product on facebook, then you pop over to Safari, search for the product, and purchase it, facebook can't attribute that sale to that ad.
The consequence of this is that goal attribution (like sales) for ads is harder, so FBs models can't learn as well who would be interested in the products. You'll see less relevant ads and companies' cost of customer acquisition will go up.
It's easy to imagine a world with less effective ad targeting since most media doesn't have effective targeting. Think pharmaceutical commercials on TV.
My own bias: I run a niche D2C brand whose business model got wrecked by this change!
Apple disallowed third party cookies (like all other browsers) so now your website with Facebook embedded can only tell Facebook "I got a visitor" and Facebook has no data on who that user is (since they look to be logged out). Before third-party cookie blocking was a thing, Facebook could track users if they were logged in on the web, and thus could potentially attribute the sale to an ad that was shown in Facebook itself.
If the user clicked the link in Facebook for your ad, then popped over to Safari by clicking the "open in Safari" button then Facebook can continue to track that because they saw the final click and can add query parameters on the other end that you can send to Facebook upon checkout completion.
What Facebook can't track now is when a user installs Candy Crush, Quit Smoking app, and Instagram... thereby limiting what ads it can show a user in Instagram to just the behavioral data they get from Instagram, instead of knowing the user also has Candy Crush and a Quick Smoking app (and thus would likely be interested in quick games and cessation of smoking stuff).
1. You're on a website about pets, which has FB code on it: Facebook can't link that activity to your account anymore, which means they'll have less accurate info about you that might be relevant to advertisers.
2. You see an ad on Facebook and then go to that website to make a purchase -> FB can't link that purchase to your profile and as such a) can't tell the advertiser whether their ads are effective b) can't use that data to optimize the campaign for users like you who might also be likely to buy.
2. Within the Facebook app if you click a link and make a purchase they can absolutely still track you. If you click a link and open it in Safari, they can still track you.
If however you see an ad on Facebook and search for it in your browser without clicking any links then Facebook can't track you, do to third party cookies being disabled.
If you go further you can probably find hundreds more interesting data points like constant location tracking or full access to any media file mixed with face recognition software.
In short: Your phone is a goldmine of information not only on yourself but anyone you know.
We are able to attribute something like half of the sales we used to. The main consequence of this is the FB models can't learn who our customers are as well, resulting in an increase in our cost of customer acquisition.
It makes selling niche products much harder.
Facebook is going to have to do something drastic to improve this situation, I suspect they are going to push advertisers to fold their store/checkout into Facebook so a customer never leaves the app. It will be the only way to track all conversion events.
Interesting feedback loops here that might not have been predicted.
The whole house of cards stood upon attribution.
These are still insane revenue growth figures, although it does appear that 70% of facebook posts just seem to be ads now, so I suspect a lot of this growth is just based on feeding more ads as a % of content which will clearly lower the user experience in the long run.
Online metrics aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny as standard financial statements. It's pretty common to see startups distort their metrics, but far fewer get away with falsifying their accounts.
I can imagine a future though when these metrics come under more legal scrutiny, just as accounting does now.
