Targeted Facebook ads are about to lose a big audience: iPhone owners
The face of Facebook (and many others) advertising is about to change as Apple gives power to users in deciding how they are tracked on ios platform. Its great news for privacy advocates but a blow to businesses who advertise on facebook platform, not to mention the investors of facebook.
With Apple’s rollout of iOS14 in September, Facebook issued a short statement to advertisers letting them know that their formerly hypertargeted ads, as facilitated by the Facebook Audience Network platform, might not work anymore.
The next update of the iPhone software will feature a new function wherein users have to opt in to being tracked by advertisers. This will require apps to ask iPhone users’ permission to collect and share their data. This puts advertisers who rely heavily on Facebook’s platform in a pickle, as Facebook’s ads are notorious for being extremely specific to the user.
Of course, only one segment of Facebook’s market uses iPhones. Android, and by extension, Google, is the bigger global player on the smartphone scene. A likely side effect of this switch will be advertisers retargeting their ads through Google’s Adsense platform.
ProPrivacy noted that the Facebook Audience Network will likely “still function full steam ahead on Android.” This could mean one big change for users: The decline of freemium apps and the rise of more apps you have to pay for.
This might force a lot of developers, who have relied on free apps, to have to go to a subscription payment model because they can’t rely on ad revenue anymore.