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

BTW, you can here the same story from small businesses' narrative: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087425495/tech-giants-and-ti...

As with most centralization or “regulation” (this case from a private company), it hurts the smallest companies the most.

Large brand advertisers don’t care about granular targeting because they have the budget to just advertise to everyone. By definition the very smallest advertisers are the one who are getting restricted here.

Luckily ATTv2 will actually fix some of this, but that’s because apple has realised they’ve killed an entire ecosystem which actually hurts the iPhone in the end.

All they are saying is that tracking is ok as long as you just ask the end user first.

Here’s Steve Jobs in 2010

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ij-jlF98SzA

Are they perfect? No. But at least they haven’t changed their stance in 12 years unlike Google et al.

I saw something amusing last week.

It was an ad being played on a local TV station. It had one of those little blue swirly "Your Ad Choices" arrow icons in the corner that are displayed on advertisements on the web.¹

This was being transmitted by a television station over the air. What, exactly was I supposed to do with that?

On a related note, getting an ATSC OTA DVR is an awesome way to watch television with zero tracking, and 100% portability. Record video directly to a USB stick, and transcode to whatever device I want for free, and keep it forever, for free. No streaming. No tracking. No subscriptions. No network charges. Just $35 to Amazon for the box.

I know that not everyone has a lot of OTA choices, but in some cities, like mine, there are over 100 channels. About 40 if you filter out infomercials, religion, and non-English. I was surprised to find there's a 24-hour news,² and 24-hour weather station³ OTA these days.

1: https://youradchoices.com 2: https://www.newsy.com 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Weather

It's like if the mafia came by your business every week to collect their $1000 to not break your kneecaps and say "look at all the happy businesses who pay us walking around, and the people who don't do business with us dragging themselves across the floor with their hands. We're an important factor in keeping people walking!"

FB had $11B in profit in Q1 on $30B of revenue, and that's after massive drop due to R&D expenses; it's hardly crushed.

Not justifying what FB did / does, but what apple did, does impact the small businesses and end users negatively and it did stem from Apple wanting to get a cut of FB's business, there is a published email thread for this, it's a known thing.

And that means from Apple too!

Note that "tracking" includes data collection. And this is where Apple's duplicity on privacy really annoys me - Apple has never stopped data collection of their users data. Instead they mislead their users by just informing you with a popup that your data can be used for personalised ads, but you can opt out it - opt out of personalised ads, not from the data collection part ( https://9to5mac.com/2021/09/02/apple-personalized-ads-target... ). And even this happened because French regulators started an anti-trust investigation into how Apple gave itself an exception (by ensuring that the "Personalised ads" options is enabled by default on ios) while blocking everyone else ( https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/09/french-antitrust-complaint-al... ).

So let's not be under any illusion that Apple is "protecting our privacy" by blocking others. They are just protecting their bottom lines by blocking their competitors. All this PR spin on how Apple blocking Facebook and Google from tracking is good for the consumers is bullshit, when all you are doing is replacing Facebook and Google for Apple! Remember that once they have our data, all they have to do in the future is to update their terms of services to use it as they want. This kind of creeping encroachment is why we need to strong data privacy laws and regulations to prevent even companies like Apple from abusing their consumers trust, and create a more fair market.

All these so called "privacy" features are also designed to help Apple data mine your personal data too ... the more data you funnel through Apple servers, the more they know about you and the less data their competitors have.

Remember that once they have our data, all they have to do in the future is to update their terms of services to use it as they want. This kind of creeping encroachment is why we need to strong data privacy laws and regulations to prevent even companies like Apple from abusing their consumers trust, and create a more fair market. Otherwise all that is happening is that you are cheering for the replacement of Facebook and Google with Apple ...

And the opt OUT of Personalised Ads? When did HN's narrative changed that opting out was ok? Or even Ads were not evil? I can assure you 95% of comments in the past 5 to 6 years on HN front page with Ads were all religiously Anti-Ads.

Probably. But if the means in which you can connect with those customers requires a surveillance apparatus that infringes on the privacy of the unconsented than perhaps the question that should be asked is does your business have a greater right to exists than the privacy of those customers (I’m guessing the reason you can’t reach them anymore is because they decided to no longer be tracked.

Someone too lazy to buy ads directly.

If you know your audience, then you already know the places where you should advertise. Contact them directly. I've placed ads directly with dozens and dozens of web sites, podcasts, vloggers, and others. Very often they're more than happy to take your money because they get to keep all of it, instead of a tiny percentage sent back to them by Google, Facebook, etc.

Business is hard. Welcome to business.

This is a classic issue of technological capability vs societal interest (i.e. we can do it, but should we?), and there are rarely easy solutions. Some of the trade offs may just mean that some business models aren't as viable - this in principle seems reasonable to vast majority of people.

The good news is that if your business model has any non-superficial value there are bound to be other ways to reach people and make a go of it, if so desired.

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.

They absolutely are better if it’s true they don’t do any tracking

With regard to Apple not tracking us with PII, that is good however.

The problem has been the micro-targeting / retargeting at the heart of Facebook and Google's surveillance capitalism model. That model enables a lot of direct to consumer small business, but it also turbocharges polarization, misinformation, and radicalization (as does the algorithmic feed). That's what consumers are increasingly looking to opt-out of, and Apple is catering to that interest.

Didn't Steve Jobs say that the 30% cut was just to keep the AppStore running?

(I'm open to bring shown, however, that Apple's new ad marketplace explicitly eschews microtargeting, but I haven't seen that so far)

No, they just follow you all over your phone, which you use to go all over the web.

Sounds like a correct understanding to me; Apple == good, Not Apple == bad. Fanboyism is a powerful thing.

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.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.acumenfinancial.co.uk/advice/airpods-revenue-vs-...

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).

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.

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.

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.