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Apple surpassed $3.5B in annual revenue from its ad network

260 points by redbell 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago
pid_0 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
soneca 4y ago
This narrative consultant created a narrative narrating that a big company used a narrative to bring them more money to bring him more money.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Title should be "Apple surpassed an estimate of $3.5B in annual revenue from its ad network".
seydor 4y ago
Just stop using apps.
- oneplane 4y ago
  For what reason?
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Because seydor told you. He sey and you dor.
  - criddell 4y ago
    So that Meta and the other underdog companies can better monetize and direct your attention.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Because apps more access and more power to track and ruin your day than PWAs do.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
You know you're a big company when 3.5 billion USD is less than 1% of your total annual revenue.
- dgs_sgd 4y ago
  The numbers are mind boggling. Airpods alone does more revenue than Twitter, Spotify, and Square combined [1]. And that was back in 2020.. [1] https://www.acumenfinancial.co.uk/advice/airpods-revenue-vs-top-tech-companies/ https://www.acumenfinancial.co.uk/advice/airpods-revenue-vs-...
  - keepquestioning 4y ago
    This is a mind boggling stat
  - devoutsalsa 4y ago
    I wanted to love Airpods, but the fall out of my ears, even when I'm sitting still. The linked article doesn't mention Beats By Dre, so I'm guessing Beats sales are not included in that $23B/year number. I wonder what is the annual for Beats. I bought a pair of the Powerbeats Pro that go over the ear & I quite like them.
    - mmis1000 4y ago
      > but the fall out of my ears, I guess it's just how true-wireless headphones work. It is designed for most common shaped ears. And if your ear did not meet it. All you can do is finding something else.
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      > but the fall out of my ears, even when I'm sitting still. That's mind boggling to me. I basically have mine in 24/7 including my daily run and while I am sleeping. They basically never fall out of my ears, and they somehow made them so comfortable that I don't even notice them and have a mini panic attack when I see they're not in the case.
braindead_in 4y ago
> On a long enough time horizon, every large company becomes an ad network. The Paperclip Maximizer Theory certainly seems to be coming true.
- occamrazor 4y ago
  And a real estate company, and a hedge fund, and a bank, and (this is more recent) a data center company. Big companies have the scale to efficiently internalize activities that smaller companies have to outsource. As time passes, they try to turn these internal service companies into profit centers.
monkin 4y ago
They put everywhere “we do not track or share data with third-parties” maybe that’s the key difference with other ad networks? It’s not like they follow you around over the web which FB or Google does. I actually don’t even see those ads, as they are only in few apps and App Store.
- chunkyguy 4y ago
  They're in the "kill competition" mode right now, so are obviously doing different than what others are doing. But what are the guarantee that they won't start selling user's data to advertisers when they're big enough? Didn't Steve Jobs say that the 30% cut was just to keep the AppStore running?
  - cloutchaser 4y ago
    OP is also just wrong. Apple is sharing data from all their properties like apple news. This is pretty similar to google and Facebook tracking you across the web. I just don’t see how it’s better for my privacy if apple sees everything I read on their app and targets advertising to me based off that, rather than google seeing I visited a news site
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      The difference between Apple News and Facebook or other third-party tracking is that Apple News only tracks what you do within their app while FB/etc track what you do everywhere on the internet. I wouldn't actually have any problems with Facebook tracking what you do on the Facebook app (or Google doing so in their own apps), the problem is when they litter the rest of the internet with spyware (Facebook "pixel", Google Analytics, etc) and then spy on what people do on other domains without clear disclosure or opt-out.
      - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
        Apple will only let you install apps through their App Store, and they correlate your actions in the App Store with the ads you click in the News app. How is that any different?
kernal 4y ago
I'm looking forward to the discussion on how Apple's ad business is more ethical and good for us.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Why is the assumption that it isn’t? Apple has been a lot better at privacy than places like google. Not betting on this being the one exception. They absolutely are better if it’s true they don’t do any tracking
  - whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
    On the other hand, Apple has been much much worse at privacy than Google if you are Chinese.
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      This isn’t incorrect but your privacy options when dealing with China are limited so Apple either has to chose no privacy or limited privacy for that market. Governments exist to regulation the actions of economic entities like companies. It’s an infinite regress to argue about apples privacy stances in china.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ > We never sell your personal information
    - thomasahle 4y ago
      Neither does Google or Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 https://m.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 Both of them hold on to your data and allow advertisers to target based on it. Just like Apple does.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. This definitely has “a think of the poor advertisers” vibe to it. Apple does have advertising, but I don’t think they engage in the dark patterns of the afore mentioned companies.
rogerkirkness 4y ago
I'm so happy for them! They must be thrilled.
imwillofficial 4y ago
The tweets are stupid. They built this ad revenue by doing it the right way, not stealing data on a massive scale and abusing it.
pupppet 4y ago
If only we had some kind of medium better-suited for long-form text. A place to write text that isn't interrupted every 280 characters of text. A "web log", if you will.
uncomputation 4y ago
> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be tracked (go figure!) but also (2) are spending more than ever. What he calls Apple’s “narrative” is actually their substantiated history of privacy-protecting technologies. Not just tracking, but iCloud Private Relay, Hide my Email, iMessage E2E encryption, keeping many things on-device only. Even the example he gave as a gotcha - personalized ads - has an opt out button right there! Try opting out of FB’s tracking and ads network and see the difference.
- fancl20 4y ago
  While this is a "narrative", there is quite a lot data back that this is a fact. You can argue that you trust and fell comfortable to give apple the power of crushing any other small businesses they don't care based on Apple's own company decision. BTW, you can here the same story from small businesses' narrative: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-tiny-dogs https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...
  - xbar 4y ago
    Yup. Facebook ads were evil. And now that wiener-dog ramp guy can't spend pennies to buy millions of impressions on cross-app-accessed data, he has to be smarter and work harder to get his ad dollars in the right place. This remains a Facebook privacy story.
    - fancl20 4y ago
      Two seperate facts: 1. Apple did use their market power crush small companies. 2. Facebook does have an awful privacy history. So the question is, do you think improving Facebook's privacy must hurt small companies? Another example, Google is working very closely with UK's Competition and Markets Authority to make sure the plan of replacing third-party cookies won't punch other companies at their faces.
m3at 4y ago
Link to the full article: https://www.youngmoney.co/p/apples-diabolical-plan-control-ads https://www.youngmoney.co/p/apples-diabolical-plan-control-a...
thumbsup-_- 4y ago
I don’t understand the point of this thread. Apple never said that advertising is bad. They just said tracking users across web is bad. When I use FB app, FB can still use my activity in their app to show me relevant ads, which they do. Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well. This is different from tracking and apple is giving a choice where FB and Google aren’t.
- mupuff1234 4y ago
  Pretty sure you can disable personalization in Google as well (no idea about fb)
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    Of course. Everyone allows that these days: https://m.facebook.com/help/568137493302217 https://m.facebook.com/help/568137493302217 Except maybe Tiktok?
- kryptiskt 4y ago
  But advertising is bad, it's just lucrative. I never want to see an ad when I use my phone, every single ad contributes to a worse experience. Every dollar that Apple manages to squeeze out of ads will come at the cost of making their devices worse. They could have resisted this and concentrated on making gigantic profits from building devices. If they can't say no to money, why don't they go into porn instead? They can't be too good for it, the ad business is far slimier than that.
- warning26 4y ago
  > Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well. Yes, and consider that Apple allows themselves to refer to tracking with soft words like "personalization" while forcing everyone else to use the scary "tracking" word. Apple should be showing the same "tracking" prompt for themselves as everyone else.
j16sdiz 4y ago
There are some factual error. "services" is more than ADs. Apple One is one of them.
ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago
As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. Human attention is the ultimate analog resource. Throughout our lifetime, it will stay in high demand. It cannot be inflated away or commoditized. What I don't get is: How can Apple prevent or even detect that other apps or websites tell Facebook about what you do? If I go to example.com and example.com sends fingerprinting and useage information about me to one of facebooks servers - how would Apple know?
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  They wouldn't, but until recently they provided explicit functionality that allowed apps to access a persistent identifier so advertising SDKs in those apps could link activities happening in between apps, something that's not normally possible due to app sandboxing. Now they've made that identifier explicitly opt-in (it prompts the user on first run) so if the user declines, advertisers have to fall back on probabilistic methods such as heuristics to try and link sessions together (which is harder especially if other countermeasures such as anti-fingerprinting, IP anonymisation with Private Relay, etc are used).
- thomasahle 4y ago
  > how would Apple know? I don't think they can. As far as I understand what they blocked was the ability of the Facebook app to send Metadata to the website that the user arrived by the action of clicking an ad. They also blocked the website being able to reply to the Facebook app whether the user bought anything. This way users og Facebook ads aren't able to see whether their ads are effective, which lower the value of them. In principle Facebook and the website could store these events (ad clicking and item buying) on their own servers, and just synchronize once in a while. I don't know if they are working on this or it already exists. However, Apple could threaten to kick the Facebook app of the platform if it provides this "service" to advertisers.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. An an Apple user, I am not. And I'm getting closer and closer to jumping ship on the whole Apple ecosystem. I wonder if this is a wise long-term strategy for their brand.
idk1 4y ago
It's a shame Apple are going down the ad route, this is what the Stocks app on MacOS looks like - https://i.imgur.com/xGrzfyL.png https://i.imgur.com/xGrzfyL.png I'd be ok if it was a big 'Diet Coke' or other big brand app, but low level spam being injected into first party apps is just not on, it might have made more revenue but at what detriment to the brand value? Over time I think more ad revenue is going to equal more brand damage in 1st party apps, and that might even leak to brand damage for Apple. Edit - Would like to add some context, Business News by Apple News is the first item open when you open that app, and this ad is below top stories, so depends if it's visible when you open it on your screen height, I did scroll for 1 second after opening the app to see this.
- morcheeba 4y ago
  That's not what Stocks looks like - you scrolled down about two pages to get to the ad. You make it look like the ad is first. https://imgur.com/a/t7ncKoc https://imgur.com/a/t7ncKoc
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    In any event, I am upset the advertisement is there at all.
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Yeah, why does a first party app that embeds news stories, and not the official News app, have to display cheap clickbait interstitial ads?
  - idk1 4y ago
    Oh yes sorry, I've edited my comment to add some context, I would stand by it is what Stocks looks like, as the app is Stocks and it looks like that. I did scroll just past the top stories to take the screenshot. I didn't mean to mislead at all, I do agree I did make it look like that, not intentionally. Also maybe the add disappears for Apple News+ subscribers? I'm not subscribed to Apple News+ so I can't speak to that.
plantain 4y ago
> But it crushed [snip] 1000s of small businesses in the process. There's a lot of comments here suggesting this is a narrative from FB/Snap, but it really isn't. I was previously able to target adverts directly to the tiny audience of potential users of my product, and the return on those adverts was nearly 10x. Overnight it entirely evaporated as a source of new customers and I don't know how I'd build a niche business again without it. Advertising gets a bad rap, but I like to believe I am providing value to my customers and they wouldn't have found my product otherwise. Who was hurt?
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  Most of the products I like, I didn't discover through ads. I'm ok with your business failing if it can't work without ads. The problem here is that ads are not banned, but that they are now the exclusivity of Apple.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    I'll bet $5 the 'niche business' is drop shipping, and the ads are targeting customers already looking for the product who would have found it for cheaper if not for the ad.
    - plantain 4y ago
      You owe me 5$.
      - mikeiz404 4y ago
        If you don’t mind sharing… - What was/is your business? - Which customers were you going after? - What other marketing / advertising approaches did you try? Edit: I’m guessing weather forecasting (https://skysight.io/ https://skysight.io/) is the business.
        plantain 4y ago
        Specialist subscription weather forecasting. I don't really want to make myself into a case study here - just sharing my experience that the Apple-induced small-business-advertising-pinch is very real.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gigel82 4y ago
Told ya!
jcuenod 4y ago
But with these ads, you're not the product.
timssopomo 4y ago
I'm an iOS user and spent 6 years working in the bowels of adtech. I'm generally skeptical of the industry. Apple's posture and position here seems like a net good for me as a user. Apple's and Facebook's approaches are totally different. Facebook vacuumed up reams of data from themselves and third parties and spat it back out into the industry indiscriminately. It _did_ likely allow some niche businesses to reach target audiences. It _also_ created and enabled a rube goldberg machine of third parties to access behavioral data in a way that likely made it personally identifiable. The same was true of most third party platforms. Cookies were fundamentally broken and users have no idea what data they were creating and no meaningful control of how it was being consumed (or by whom). All sorts of harm was done in ways that was difficult to quantify. Apple giving individuals meaningful control over their data within Apple's ecosystem and protecting anonymity at the boundary of their platform is a net good. Apple's segmentation and targeting of users is fundamentally different than cookie based targeting utilizing 3P data. The fact that this hurt parties who unknowingly relied on 3P data in good faith is a sad externality, but nobody should lose sleep over it. I wouldn't feel bad about mom and pop groceries losing revenue from cigarette sales either.
flixing 4y ago
Apple is the biggest hypocrite of the last decade. They manipulate press, users and regulators with this privacy narrative.
jeppester 4y ago
Apple should either be forced to allow third party stores, or they should not be allowed to leverage their store to gain unfair advantages. Whether it's about forcing their SSO solution, forcing their payment solution, forcing their (inferior) browser engine, Apple apps showing up first in the store, or disallowing personalized ads only for third parties. I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they are so obviously anti-competitive. But as usual lots of people think it's okay because Apple are the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys. Usually the good guys don't need unfair advantages in order to win.
- warning26 4y ago
  > I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they are so obviously anti-competitive. But as usual lots of people think it's okay because Apple are the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys. Sounds like a correct understanding to me; Apple == good, Not Apple == bad. Fanboyism is a powerful thing.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mensetmanusman 4y ago
The more apple expands the more risk they will get from anti trust activity.
fny 4y ago
Wait... do I hear this correctly... while Apple blocks others from using this data, Apple can use this data for its own ad network? Isn't there an antitrust issue here?
- viktorcode 4y ago
  The text is written in such a way to make you think that indeed Apple themselves do the same tracking which they blocked for others. The opposite is true. Apple don't track users outside of their services. Apple tracking inside their apps has always been opt-in. Meta, Google, Amazon are still free to track users inside their ecosystem, but outside tracking has become opt-in.
malshe 4y ago
Yet another Twitter thread without any supporting evidence for the numbers. The claim here is that Apple "surpassed" $3.5 billion in annual revenue from the ad network. This is the headline so obviously I would like to know how the author got this number. However, all we get is irrelevant information. Below m3at has linked to the original article. It says Apple's ad revenue in 2019 was $500 million. Source? It links to an article on another website, which linked to a 2018 AppleInsider article (https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/22/apple-looking-at-2-billion-from-search-ad-business-alone-by-2020 https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/22/apple-looking-at-...). That article states: "An analyst is predicting that Apple's Search Ad business will generate $500 million in fiscal year 2018 alone" Somehow this estimate from 2018 is now suddenly the actual ad revenue for Apple in 2019. Next, I checked where the $3.5 billion number comes from. The closest I could get to this number is from this Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-aapl-set-to-expand-advertising-bringing-ads-to-maps-tv-and-books-apps-l6tdqqmg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-... It claims: "It’s [Apple's ads group] generating about $4 billion in revenue annually" Again, there is no source for this information. So we are discussing a Twitter thread that's designed to generate outrage. The irony is that it did not get much traction on Twitter but found its audience at HN!
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Nice research. Exactly, without a source I seriously question if $3.5B is correct. $500M maybe, that not a much money as it once where. Given the places where ads are even a thing, $3.5B seems excessive.
  - malshe 4y ago
    > Given the places where ads are even a thing, $3.5B seems excessive. I agree. I see the ads primarily in the News app and it is almost always the same 2-3 ads. Of course, I am not going to extrapolate that to all the Apple News readers. That's why I was curious to learn how the OP on Twitter found these numbers. In their 10-Qs and 10-Ks, Apple has been consolidating the revenue streams and expenses under larger items (e.g., advertising spending is now not disclosed separately but only as a part of SG&A expenses, iPhone sales by model are no longer disclosed). As such, finding out their ad business is not easy by any means.
mrweasel 4y ago
How is that even possible? I use Apple products daily. iPhone, Mac and an AppleTV, where is Apple ad network even a thing? I see someone mention the stock app in macOS, there's typically an ad in the App Store search (which kinda suck) and then there's the in app ads. In app has ads are pretty much a give away that the app is going to suck, so I don't bother with apps that doesn't have a price. If nothing else the ads will always look misplaced and detract from the UI, making me want to use it less. My point is: You see so few ads in the Apple ecosystem that I seriously question if those $3.5B is correct. Still, I'd prefer no ads, and I fear that Apple will be forced to ramp up the ads, once the shareholders see it as a major profit center to be exploited.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  I think it's mostly app store. Amazon's ad service is now bring in 9 billion in revenue, there's tons of money to be made by taking over mindshare at the point of sale.
kderbyma 4y ago
it's amazing....windows turned to ads...mac suddenly takes over and becomes massive in the personal computer space.....sure M1...but imho...it was because of how aggressive Microsoft became with its adware.... people want freedom....now Apple is about to step in big gaping hole it should have seen coming but the glittering pile of gold is distracting them... 3-5 years...washed up?
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  As long as 'growth at any cost' is the only edict that matters in the global economy, everything will tend towards advertisements and ever more aggressive tactics. It's a race to the bottom, and it's disgusting and a humiliation for the entire human race that this is what society chooses to prioritize over its own survival.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kornhole 4y ago
Google pays Apple about $15B a year to be integrated into their products. Since Google is primarily advertising, why isn't that considered advertising revenue for Apple?
- kernal 4y ago
  Has the actual number been disclosed? It seems whenever someone mentions this the number keeps getting higher and higher.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    It has been rising every year. Last year was $15B and this year it seems to be about $20B. https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-launching-its-own-search-engine/ https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...
thekingofrome 4y ago
As a relative stranger to Twitter, I can't help but feel a thread of Tweets is unsuitable for telling this story, surely he should just write an article about it rather than have it chopped into chunks and strung into a thread?

260 points by redbell 4y ago

newaccount2021 4y ago

pid_0 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

soneca 4y ago

This narrative consultant created a narrative narrating that a big company used a narrative to bring them more money to bring him more money.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Title should be "Apple surpassed an estimate of $3.5B in annual revenue from its ad network".

seydor 4y ago

Just stop using apps.

oneplane 4y ago
For what reason?
- EGreg 4y ago
  Because seydor told you. He sey and you dor.
- criddell 4y ago
  So that Meta and the other underdog companies can better monetize and direct your attention.
- postalrat 4y ago
  Because apps more access and more power to track and ruin your day than PWAs do.

devoutsalsa 4y ago

You know you're a big company when 3.5 billion USD is less than 1% of your total annual revenue.

dgs_sgd 4y ago
The numbers are mind boggling. Airpods alone does more revenue than Twitter, Spotify, and Square combined [1]. And that was back in 2020.. [1] https://www.acumenfinancial.co.uk/advice/airpods-revenue-vs-top-tech-companies/ https://www.acumenfinancial.co.uk/advice/airpods-revenue-vs-...
- keepquestioning 4y ago
  This is a mind boggling stat
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  I wanted to love Airpods, but the fall out of my ears, even when I'm sitting still. The linked article doesn't mention Beats By Dre, so I'm guessing Beats sales are not included in that $23B/year number. I wonder what is the annual for Beats. I bought a pair of the Powerbeats Pro that go over the ear & I quite like them.
  - mmis1000 4y ago
    > but the fall out of my ears, I guess it's just how true-wireless headphones work. It is designed for most common shaped ears. And if your ear did not meet it. All you can do is finding something else.
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    > but the fall out of my ears, even when I'm sitting still. That's mind boggling to me. I basically have mine in 24/7 including my daily run and while I am sleeping. They basically never fall out of my ears, and they somehow made them so comfortable that I don't even notice them and have a mini panic attack when I see they're not in the case.

braindead_in 4y ago

> On a long enough time horizon, every large company becomes an ad network. The Paperclip Maximizer Theory certainly seems to be coming true.

occamrazor 4y ago
And a real estate company, and a hedge fund, and a bank, and (this is more recent) a data center company. Big companies have the scale to efficiently internalize activities that smaller companies have to outsource. As time passes, they try to turn these internal service companies into profit centers.

monkin 4y ago

They put everywhere “we do not track or share data with third-parties” maybe that’s the key difference with other ad networks? It’s not like they follow you around over the web which FB or Google does. I actually don’t even see those ads, as they are only in few apps and App Store.

chunkyguy 4y ago
They're in the "kill competition" mode right now, so are obviously doing different than what others are doing. But what are the guarantee that they won't start selling user's data to advertisers when they're big enough? Didn't Steve Jobs say that the 30% cut was just to keep the AppStore running?
- cloutchaser 4y ago
  OP is also just wrong. Apple is sharing data from all their properties like apple news. This is pretty similar to google and Facebook tracking you across the web. I just don’t see how it’s better for my privacy if apple sees everything I read on their app and targets advertising to me based off that, rather than google seeing I visited a news site
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    The difference between Apple News and Facebook or other third-party tracking is that Apple News only tracks what you do within their app while FB/etc track what you do everywhere on the internet. I wouldn't actually have any problems with Facebook tracking what you do on the Facebook app (or Google doing so in their own apps), the problem is when they litter the rest of the internet with spyware (Facebook "pixel", Google Analytics, etc) and then spy on what people do on other domains without clear disclosure or opt-out.
    - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
      Apple will only let you install apps through their App Store, and they correlate your actions in the App Store with the ads you click in the News app. How is that any different?

kernal 4y ago

I'm looking forward to the discussion on how Apple's ad business is more ethical and good for us.

edgyquant 4y ago
Why is the assumption that it isn’t? Apple has been a lot better at privacy than places like google. Not betting on this being the one exception. They absolutely are better if it’s true they don’t do any tracking
- whatgoodisaroad 4y ago
  On the other hand, Apple has been much much worse at privacy than Google if you are Chinese.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    This isn’t incorrect but your privacy options when dealing with China are limited so Apple either has to chose no privacy or limited privacy for that market. Governments exist to regulation the actions of economic entities like companies. It’s an infinite regress to argue about apples privacy stances in china.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ https://safety.google/privacy/ads-and-data/ > We never sell your personal information
  - thomasahle 4y ago
    Neither does Google or Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 https://m.facebook.com/help/152637448140583 Both of them hold on to your data and allow advertisers to target based on it. Just like Apple does.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. This definitely has “a think of the poor advertisers” vibe to it. Apple does have advertising, but I don’t think they engage in the dark patterns of the afore mentioned companies.

rogerkirkness 4y ago

I'm so happy for them! They must be thrilled.

imwillofficial 4y ago

The tweets are stupid. They built this ad revenue by doing it the right way, not stealing data on a massive scale and abusing it.

pupppet 4y ago

If only we had some kind of medium better-suited for long-form text. A place to write text that isn't interrupted every 280 characters of text. A "web log", if you will.

uncomputation 4y ago

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be tracked (go figure!) but also (2) are spending more than ever. What he calls Apple’s “narrative” is actually their substantiated history of privacy-protecting technologies. Not just tracking, but iCloud Private Relay, Hide my Email, iMessage E2E encryption, keeping many things on-device only. Even the example he gave as a gotcha - personalized ads - has an opt out button right there! Try opting out of FB’s tracking and ads network and see the difference.

fancl20 4y ago
While this is a "narrative", there is quite a lot data back that this is a fact. You can argue that you trust and fell comfortable to give apple the power of crushing any other small businesses they don't care based on Apple's own company decision. BTW, you can here the same story from small businesses' narrative: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-tiny-dogs https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...
- xbar 4y ago
  Yup. Facebook ads were evil. And now that wiener-dog ramp guy can't spend pennies to buy millions of impressions on cross-app-accessed data, he has to be smarter and work harder to get his ad dollars in the right place. This remains a Facebook privacy story.
  - fancl20 4y ago
    Two seperate facts: 1. Apple did use their market power crush small companies. 2. Facebook does have an awful privacy history. So the question is, do you think improving Facebook's privacy must hurt small companies? Another example, Google is working very closely with UK's Competition and Markets Authority to make sure the plan of replacing third-party cookies won't punch other companies at their faces.

m3at 4y ago

Link to the full article: https://www.youngmoney.co/p/apples-diabolical-plan-control-ads https://www.youngmoney.co/p/apples-diabolical-plan-control-a...

thumbsup-_- 4y ago

I don’t understand the point of this thread. Apple never said that advertising is bad. They just said tracking users across web is bad. When I use FB app, FB can still use my activity in their app to show me relevant ads, which they do. Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well. This is different from tracking and apple is giving a choice where FB and Google aren’t.

mupuff1234 4y ago
Pretty sure you can disable personalization in Google as well (no idea about fb)
- thomasahle 4y ago
  Of course. Everyone allows that these days: https://m.facebook.com/help/568137493302217 https://m.facebook.com/help/568137493302217 Except maybe Tiktok?
kryptiskt 4y ago
But advertising is bad, it's just lucrative. I never want to see an ad when I use my phone, every single ad contributes to a worse experience. Every dollar that Apple manages to squeeze out of ads will come at the cost of making their devices worse. They could have resisted this and concentrated on making gigantic profits from building devices. If they can't say no to money, why don't they go into porn instead? They can't be too good for it, the ad business is far slimier than that.
warning26 4y ago
> Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well. Yes, and consider that Apple allows themselves to refer to tracking with soft words like "personalization" while forcing everyone else to use the scary "tracking" word. Apple should be showing the same "tracking" prompt for themselves as everyone else.

j16sdiz 4y ago

There are some factual error. "services" is more than ADs. Apple One is one of them.

ArtTimeInvestor 4y ago

As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. Human attention is the ultimate analog resource. Throughout our lifetime, it will stay in high demand. It cannot be inflated away or commoditized. What I don't get is: How can Apple prevent or even detect that other apps or websites tell Facebook about what you do? If I go to example.com and example.com sends fingerprinting and useage information about me to one of facebooks servers - how would Apple know?

Nextgrid 4y ago
They wouldn't, but until recently they provided explicit functionality that allowed apps to access a persistent identifier so advertising SDKs in those apps could link activities happening in between apps, something that's not normally possible due to app sandboxing. Now they've made that identifier explicitly opt-in (it prompts the user on first run) so if the user declines, advertisers have to fall back on probabilistic methods such as heuristics to try and link sessions together (which is harder especially if other countermeasures such as anti-fingerprinting, IP anonymisation with Private Relay, etc are used).
thomasahle 4y ago
> how would Apple know? I don't think they can. As far as I understand what they blocked was the ability of the Facebook app to send Metadata to the website that the user arrived by the action of clicking an ad. They also blocked the website being able to reply to the Facebook app whether the user bought anything. This way users og Facebook ads aren't able to see whether their ads are effective, which lower the value of them. In principle Facebook and the website could store these events (ad clicking and item buying) on their own servers, and just synchronize once in a while. I don't know if they are working on this or it already exists. However, Apple could threaten to kick the Facebook app of the platform if it provides this "service" to advertisers.
AlexandrB 4y ago
> As an Apple investor, I am happy to seem them grow an advertising business. An an Apple user, I am not. And I'm getting closer and closer to jumping ship on the whole Apple ecosystem. I wonder if this is a wise long-term strategy for their brand.

idk1 4y ago

It's a shame Apple are going down the ad route, this is what the Stocks app on MacOS looks like - https://i.imgur.com/xGrzfyL.png https://i.imgur.com/xGrzfyL.png I'd be ok if it was a big 'Diet Coke' or other big brand app, but low level spam being injected into first party apps is just not on, it might have made more revenue but at what detriment to the brand value? Over time I think more ad revenue is going to equal more brand damage in 1st party apps, and that might even leak to brand damage for Apple. Edit - Would like to add some context, Business News by Apple News is the first item open when you open that app, and this ad is below top stories, so depends if it's visible when you open it on your screen height, I did scroll for 1 second after opening the app to see this.

morcheeba 4y ago
That's not what Stocks looks like - you scrolled down about two pages to get to the ad. You make it look like the ad is first. https://imgur.com/a/t7ncKoc https://imgur.com/a/t7ncKoc
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  In any event, I am upset the advertisement is there at all.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Yeah, why does a first party app that embeds news stories, and not the official News app, have to display cheap clickbait interstitial ads?
- idk1 4y ago
  Oh yes sorry, I've edited my comment to add some context, I would stand by it is what Stocks looks like, as the app is Stocks and it looks like that. I did scroll just past the top stories to take the screenshot. I didn't mean to mislead at all, I do agree I did make it look like that, not intentionally. Also maybe the add disappears for Apple News+ subscribers? I'm not subscribed to Apple News+ so I can't speak to that.

plantain 4y ago

> But it crushed [snip] 1000s of small businesses in the process. There's a lot of comments here suggesting this is a narrative from FB/Snap, but it really isn't. I was previously able to target adverts directly to the tiny audience of potential users of my product, and the return on those adverts was nearly 10x. Overnight it entirely evaporated as a source of new customers and I don't know how I'd build a niche business again without it. Advertising gets a bad rap, but I like to believe I am providing value to my customers and they wouldn't have found my product otherwise. Who was hurt?

BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Most of the products I like, I didn't discover through ads. I'm ok with your business failing if it can't work without ads. The problem here is that ads are not banned, but that they are now the exclusivity of Apple.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  I'll bet $5 the 'niche business' is drop shipping, and the ads are targeting customers already looking for the product who would have found it for cheaper if not for the ad.
  - plantain 4y ago
    You owe me 5$.
    - mikeiz404 4y ago
      If you don’t mind sharing… - What was/is your business? - Which customers were you going after? - What other marketing / advertising approaches did you try? Edit: I’m guessing weather forecasting (https://skysight.io/ https://skysight.io/) is the business.
      - plantain 4y ago
        Specialist subscription weather forecasting. I don't really want to make myself into a case study here - just sharing my experience that the Apple-induced small-business-advertising-pinch is very real.

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gigel82 4y ago

Told ya!

jcuenod 4y ago

But with these ads, you're not the product.

timssopomo 4y ago

I'm an iOS user and spent 6 years working in the bowels of adtech. I'm generally skeptical of the industry. Apple's posture and position here seems like a net good for me as a user. Apple's and Facebook's approaches are totally different. Facebook vacuumed up reams of data from themselves and third parties and spat it back out into the industry indiscriminately. It _did_ likely allow some niche businesses to reach target audiences. It _also_ created and enabled a rube goldberg machine of third parties to access behavioral data in a way that likely made it personally identifiable. The same was true of most third party platforms. Cookies were fundamentally broken and users have no idea what data they were creating and no meaningful control of how it was being consumed (or by whom). All sorts of harm was done in ways that was difficult to quantify. Apple giving individuals meaningful control over their data within Apple's ecosystem and protecting anonymity at the boundary of their platform is a net good. Apple's segmentation and targeting of users is fundamentally different than cookie based targeting utilizing 3P data. The fact that this hurt parties who unknowingly relied on 3P data in good faith is a sad externality, but nobody should lose sleep over it. I wouldn't feel bad about mom and pop groceries losing revenue from cigarette sales either.

flixing 4y ago

Apple is the biggest hypocrite of the last decade. They manipulate press, users and regulators with this privacy narrative.

jeppester 4y ago

Apple should either be forced to allow third party stores, or they should not be allowed to leverage their store to gain unfair advantages. Whether it's about forcing their SSO solution, forcing their payment solution, forcing their (inferior) browser engine, Apple apps showing up first in the store, or disallowing personalized ads only for third parties. I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they are so obviously anti-competitive. But as usual lots of people think it's okay because Apple are the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys. Usually the good guys don't need unfair advantages in order to win.

warning26 4y ago
> I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they are so obviously anti-competitive. But as usual lots of people think it's okay because Apple are the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys. Sounds like a correct understanding to me; Apple == good, Not Apple == bad. Fanboyism is a powerful thing.

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mensetmanusman 4y ago

The more apple expands the more risk they will get from anti trust activity.

fny 4y ago

Wait... do I hear this correctly... while Apple blocks others from using this data, Apple can use this data for its own ad network? Isn't there an antitrust issue here?

viktorcode 4y ago
The text is written in such a way to make you think that indeed Apple themselves do the same tracking which they blocked for others. The opposite is true. Apple don't track users outside of their services. Apple tracking inside their apps has always been opt-in. Meta, Google, Amazon are still free to track users inside their ecosystem, but outside tracking has become opt-in.

malshe 4y ago

Yet another Twitter thread without any supporting evidence for the numbers. The claim here is that Apple "surpassed" $3.5 billion in annual revenue from the ad network. This is the headline so obviously I would like to know how the author got this number. However, all we get is irrelevant information. Below m3at has linked to the original article. It says Apple's ad revenue in 2019 was $500 million. Source? It links to an article on another website, which linked to a 2018 AppleInsider article (https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/22/apple-looking-at-2-billion-from-search-ad-business-alone-by-2020 https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/10/22/apple-looking-at-...). That article states: "An analyst is predicting that Apple's Search Ad business will generate $500 million in fiscal year 2018 alone" Somehow this estimate from 2018 is now suddenly the actual ad revenue for Apple in 2019. Next, I checked where the $3.5 billion number comes from. The closest I could get to this number is from this Bloomberg article: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-aapl-set-to-expand-advertising-bringing-ads-to-maps-tv-and-books-apps-l6tdqqmg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-... It claims: "It’s [Apple's ads group] generating about $4 billion in revenue annually" Again, there is no source for this information. So we are discussing a Twitter thread that's designed to generate outrage. The irony is that it did not get much traction on Twitter but found its audience at HN!

mrweasel 4y ago
Nice research. Exactly, without a source I seriously question if $3.5B is correct. $500M maybe, that not a much money as it once where. Given the places where ads are even a thing, $3.5B seems excessive.
- malshe 4y ago
  > Given the places where ads are even a thing, $3.5B seems excessive. I agree. I see the ads primarily in the News app and it is almost always the same 2-3 ads. Of course, I am not going to extrapolate that to all the Apple News readers. That's why I was curious to learn how the OP on Twitter found these numbers. In their 10-Qs and 10-Ks, Apple has been consolidating the revenue streams and expenses under larger items (e.g., advertising spending is now not disclosed separately but only as a part of SG&A expenses, iPhone sales by model are no longer disclosed). As such, finding out their ad business is not easy by any means.

mrweasel 4y ago

How is that even possible? I use Apple products daily. iPhone, Mac and an AppleTV, where is Apple ad network even a thing? I see someone mention the stock app in macOS, there's typically an ad in the App Store search (which kinda suck) and then there's the in app ads. In app has ads are pretty much a give away that the app is going to suck, so I don't bother with apps that doesn't have a price. If nothing else the ads will always look misplaced and detract from the UI, making me want to use it less. My point is: You see so few ads in the Apple ecosystem that I seriously question if those $3.5B is correct. Still, I'd prefer no ads, and I fear that Apple will be forced to ramp up the ads, once the shareholders see it as a major profit center to be exploited.

colinmhayes 4y ago
I think it's mostly app store. Amazon's ad service is now bring in 9 billion in revenue, there's tons of money to be made by taking over mindshare at the point of sale.

kderbyma 4y ago

it's amazing....windows turned to ads...mac suddenly takes over and becomes massive in the personal computer space.....sure M1...but imho...it was because of how aggressive Microsoft became with its adware.... people want freedom....now Apple is about to step in big gaping hole it should have seen coming but the glittering pile of gold is distracting them... 3-5 years...washed up?

CatWChainsaw 4y ago
As long as 'growth at any cost' is the only edict that matters in the global economy, everything will tend towards advertisements and ever more aggressive tactics. It's a race to the bottom, and it's disgusting and a humiliation for the entire human race that this is what society chooses to prioritize over its own survival.

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kornhole 4y ago

Google pays Apple about $15B a year to be integrated into their products. Since Google is primarily advertising, why isn't that considered advertising revenue for Apple?

kernal 4y ago
Has the actual number been disclosed? It seems whenever someone mentions this the number keeps getting higher and higher.
- kornhole 4y ago
  It has been rising every year. Last year was $15B and this year it seems to be about $20B. https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-launching-its-own-search-engine/ https://dazeinfo.com/2022/01/05/google-pays-apple-for-not-la...

thekingofrome 4y ago

As a relative stranger to Twitter, I can't help but feel a thread of Tweets is unsuitable for telling this story, surely he should just write an article about it rather than have it chopped into chunks and strung into a thread?