While 2020 proved to be good year for Facebook in terms of growth, 2021 looks uncertain for a whole lot of reasons.
The last quarter of the previous year was great in terms of revenue as well as user strength growth for Facebook. It gained a lot of new users during the pandemic because practically everyone was under lockdown and many switched towards social media as a means of entertainment.
The first reason for the expected uncertainty is Apple’s new privacy policy. Apple has ordered all apps on App Store to come clean with what data they will be taking from the user and a pop up will appear to the user notifying them about their data and asking for consent that whether or not they want the app to make use of their data. Considering majority of the brands and developers use this data for linking user preferred advertisements with the user and a large sum of Facebook’s revenue comes from the advertisement it allows brand to do on its app. This will be a huge loss for Facebook as it is expected that majority of people will deny that consent, but Facebook has no say other than accepting this policy or else they will be blocked from the App Store.
Mark Zuckerberg is not happy with this policy and in a conference said that Apple is only thinking about itself and not others. It also claimed it is also one of Apple’s mean motive that they have their own competitive interests and is using its own platform to interfere with how the rival apps work.
Meanwhile, Apple denies all this saying that all they want is to be transparent with their users. According to them it is the users right to know which of their data is being processed and have a say whether they want their data to be shared or not which is true and makes a lot of sense.
Apart from this reason, people in the States and Canada are switching to different apps as a means to their entertainment probably TikTok which has become the fastest growing app in 2020. The user strength which was increasing near to a crawl prior to pandemic has stopped drastically in those regions. According to analyst the coming year looks hard for Facebook.
Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images
Read next: Will Facebook permanently stop recommending political groups to its users? Zuckerberg says this is a crucial act taken by the company to hold the temperature down
The last quarter of the previous year was great in terms of revenue as well as user strength growth for Facebook. It gained a lot of new users during the pandemic because practically everyone was under lockdown and many switched towards social media as a means of entertainment.
The first reason for the expected uncertainty is Apple’s new privacy policy. Apple has ordered all apps on App Store to come clean with what data they will be taking from the user and a pop up will appear to the user notifying them about their data and asking for consent that whether or not they want the app to make use of their data. Considering majority of the brands and developers use this data for linking user preferred advertisements with the user and a large sum of Facebook’s revenue comes from the advertisement it allows brand to do on its app. This will be a huge loss for Facebook as it is expected that majority of people will deny that consent, but Facebook has no say other than accepting this policy or else they will be blocked from the App Store.
Mark Zuckerberg is not happy with this policy and in a conference said that Apple is only thinking about itself and not others. It also claimed it is also one of Apple’s mean motive that they have their own competitive interests and is using its own platform to interfere with how the rival apps work.
Meanwhile, Apple denies all this saying that all they want is to be transparent with their users. According to them it is the users right to know which of their data is being processed and have a say whether they want their data to be shared or not which is true and makes a lot of sense.
Apart from this reason, people in the States and Canada are switching to different apps as a means to their entertainment probably TikTok which has become the fastest growing app in 2020. The user strength which was increasing near to a crawl prior to pandemic has stopped drastically in those regions. According to analyst the coming year looks hard for Facebook.
Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images
Read next: Will Facebook permanently stop recommending political groups to its users? Zuckerberg says this is a crucial act taken by the company to hold the temperature down