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Comment by cpurdy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook and Google got hit very hard in the recent quarter, but none of the articles point out one of the obvious reasons contributing to their drops: Apple made it significantly harder to track macOS and iOS users, which people tend to be high value targets for advertisements.

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> Apple made it significantly harder to track

I think that's a dangerous way to frame it. It's certainly the narrative Facebook wants out there.

Apple provided their users with more control over how their data is shared and those users overwhelmingly said no to Facebook and Google tracking them.

This was priced in last year when facebook said it would cost them $10 billion a year. Google has next to no presence in mobile apps/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much.

>Google has next to no presence in mobile/non-browser ads so I dont think they care much.

Uh... what?

Yeah that's crazy talk. Mobile search has represented over 50% of ad revenue for a while, hasn't it?

apple's changes made it harder to use a users profile from one app to target them on another app. All of google's ads are served on a browser so they weren't affected.

When you use a free app that shows you ads, whose ad network do you think is serving those ads?

facebook's...

According to stats like this one and many others, Google AdMob has a much larger presence in terms of serving ads on mobile apps: https://appfigures.com/top-sdks/ads/all

fair enough, thanks for the source.

Sure thing!

>This was priced in

Ah yes, those perfectly efficient markets, where everyone is doing DCF analysis.

Feels a little silly to be talking about things being "priced in" when a trillion-dollar-company loses a quarter of its market cap in 24 hours, no?

Mark going rogue was not priced in. That's why the stock dropped 21%, not because their revenue was down 4%.

Yeah, there's probably no other economic headwinds the low earnings could be due to. Must just be the thing you said.

Those changes happened 1.5 years ago, so it doesn't seem at all obvious why they'd have a larger impact now than in the previous 4 quarters.

Not sure that hurts Google anywhere near as much as it does Facebook?

Apple made it particularly hard to track conversions. Also, what did they do on macOS to make it difficult?

I think you mean "Apple made it significantly harder for anyone but Apple to track macOS and iOS users". To their credit, it's a strategic masterpiece, as their hardware market growth slows they've built an impressive system to give than an edge in services and advertising.

Are you saying they have different rules for other advertisers than themselves in terms of what a user can control about what’s being tracked about them that can be used to drive ads?

Yes, this already exists. Pre-installed apps don't have to ask for the same permissions and defaults to sharing.

That happened almost 2 years ago - how long will they milk that excuse?

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