Facebook Follies

Study: App Tracking Transparency to Cost Facebook ~$13B in 2022

14 APRIL 2022 - Year two of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency looks like it’ll take a serious chunk out of the online ad industry - most of that at Facebook’s expense. App Tracking Transparency is a set of standards set by Apple where companies that want to track an iOS user’s activity across various applications and the web have to get a user’s permission to do so. Not surprisingly, when you ask people whether you can watch every single thing they do, they tend to say “no.” But large parts of businesses like Facebook’s were built on that, thus the hurt. 

Facebook has said it’ll take a $10 billion hit this year due to ATT. That’s on top of the $8.1 billion lost in 2021, according to Cult of Mac. But, a piece form Apple Insider has word of new analysis that thinks $10 billion this year is actually a little low. The site has the firm Lotame [low-da-mee] says that Apple’s “change will have an impact on [affected] companies of nearly $16 billion,” 81% of which will come out of Facebook. According to the piece:

That 81% for Facebook represents an estimated $12.8 billion. Lotame estimates the rest of the lost revenue as $546 million for Snap, $323 million for Twitter, and $2.2 billion for YouTube.

It’s unclear whether this hurt will stop or companies will just get used to it. Apple Insider says Apple’s introduced tools to help companies through the transition. Facebook is said to have done the same. According to the report:

…Lotame even says that it will not continue researching the topic. Lotame says that it expects “other shocks” to affect the advertising industry, and that by the second half of 2022, ATT's impact will have been “cauterized.”

Facebook’s VR Sales Commission: Half (!!!)

No offense to Facebook, but Facebook really is the worst. And I do, by the way, mean offense to Facebook. It is a platform that siphons as much personal information as it can, it allows nefarious third-parties to siphon as much personal information as they can, it allows racist and authoritarian content to thrive, and - oops - throws democracy itself into peril. 

All of that, and it’s hypocritical. Pardon my Leno, but “did you hear about this?” Facebook plans to take a commission of nearly 50% on sales made in its version of the metaverse. I’m no Pythagoras, but 50% sounds like more than the 30% Apple charges, an amount about which Facebook has complained. According to a piece from MacRumors:

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to CNBC Wednesday that Meta will take an overall cut of up to 47.5% on each transaction. That includes a “hardware platform fee” of 30% for sales made through the Meta Quest Store, where it sells apps and games for its virtual reality headsets. On top of that, Horizon Worlds [which sounds like Facebook’s Roblox or Sansar], will charge a 17.5% fee.

This from the company that said (according to MacRumors):

…that the ‌App Store‌ cut makes “opportunities for creators to make money from their work” harder. Facebook has a long history of calling Apple's ‌App Store‌ and its 15% to 30% commission "monopolistic" and harmful to customers, adding the platform “blocks innovation [and] blocks competition.”

But 50% is cool. 

Facebook is seriously the worst.