Apple’s lack of dependence on advertising and the like is partly influenced by their strong product line as well as the high volume of sales that their products tend to generate. In order to make themselves a more privacy conscious tech company, something that the world is sorely lacking in with most corporations mining sensitive data for profit, Apple decided to implement a new policy in their iOS update that would make it so that all iPhone and Apple product users would be opted out of third party tracking by default.
Third party tracking is something that apps like Facebook rely on in order to be able to sell the right amount of ads, and the fact that these companies were losing out on such a massive amount of third party tracking is something that was definitely going to hit them in the wallets. There was a lot of speculation surrounding what type of impact this might have, and Facebook’s parent company Meta recently put a number to it after their Q4 2021 revenue report.
During a call with various analysts, Meta CFO Dave Wehner stated that he expects Facebook to lose out on $10 billion in revenue due to decreased ad sales. This is a direct impact of Apple’s new policies, and the fact that so many users are choosing not to opt in to third party tracking even though they have the option to has revealed that they don’t particularly want that to happen and Facebook was relying on their ignorance or lack of power to generate the revenue that it required.
This resulted in Meta’s share price plummeting by around 23%. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 was also lower than expected. Most analysts had projected Meta’s revenues to be in excess of $30 billion during Q4 2021, but it turns out that actual revenues failed to hit the $30 billion mark instead falling somewhere between $27 billion and $29 billion. In Q4 2021, Facebook recorded 1.929 billion daily active users and 2.912 billion monthly active users, while its daily active person (aka collectively Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp users) reached to 2.82 billion mark and its Family Monthly Active People touched 3.59 billion mark, however, it appears these numbers are about to peak. It’s pretty clear that Meta is in dire straits, and that might have resulted in the company pivoting to the metaverse and potentially getting out of the social media game entirely in the future.
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Third party tracking is something that apps like Facebook rely on in order to be able to sell the right amount of ads, and the fact that these companies were losing out on such a massive amount of third party tracking is something that was definitely going to hit them in the wallets. There was a lot of speculation surrounding what type of impact this might have, and Facebook’s parent company Meta recently put a number to it after their Q4 2021 revenue report.
During a call with various analysts, Meta CFO Dave Wehner stated that he expects Facebook to lose out on $10 billion in revenue due to decreased ad sales. This is a direct impact of Apple’s new policies, and the fact that so many users are choosing not to opt in to third party tracking even though they have the option to has revealed that they don’t particularly want that to happen and Facebook was relying on their ignorance or lack of power to generate the revenue that it required.
This resulted in Meta’s share price plummeting by around 23%. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2021 was also lower than expected. Most analysts had projected Meta’s revenues to be in excess of $30 billion during Q4 2021, but it turns out that actual revenues failed to hit the $30 billion mark instead falling somewhere between $27 billion and $29 billion. In Q4 2021, Facebook recorded 1.929 billion daily active users and 2.912 billion monthly active users, while its daily active person (aka collectively Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and/or WhatsApp users) reached to 2.82 billion mark and its Family Monthly Active People touched 3.59 billion mark, however, it appears these numbers are about to peak. It’s pretty clear that Meta is in dire straits, and that might have resulted in the company pivoting to the metaverse and potentially getting out of the social media game entirely in the future.
Read next: Meta Is Winding Back Its Express Wi-Fi Community Oriented Program, Owing To Some Technical Issues