Apple’s privacy changes cost Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat nearly $10 billion

According to a Financial Times investigation, social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lost around $9.85 billion in revenue as a result of Apple's changes to its privacy policy. The new iOS App Store policy requires apps to ask permission to track users' data.

Lotame, an advertisement technology business, calculated that the four tech platforms lost 12% of revenue in the third and fourth quarters, which translates into $9.85 billion. But the company most affected is Snap, which bases its business model on smartphone use and Facebook.

According to Statista, Snap was affected the most because its advertising is mainly tied to smartphones. According to Adtech consultant Eric Seufert, Facebook alone might have lost up to $8.3 billion in revenue in the second half of 2021.

“Some of the platforms that were most impacted—but especially Facebook—have to rebuild their machinery from scratch as a result of ATT. My belief is that it takes at least one year to build new infrastructure. New tools and frameworks need to be developed from scratch and tested extensively before being deployed to a high number of users”, Seufert said in an interview.

As for Apple, the last quarter it surpassed revenue estimates for its advertising activity by 700 million dollars, exceeding approximately 18.3 billion dollars, the Financial Times reports.