Academic Study on Negative Effects of Apple's ATT on E-Commerce Retailers

> We find that conversion-optimized Meta advertisements, affected most by ATT, saw a 37% reduction in click-through rates after ATT.

Some very specialized metric, maybe important to a company that's not known to be consumer friendly, is negatively effected. There's always tension between providing goods and services and ripping off your customers.

ssembling novel datasets on online advertiser spending, performance, and revenue, we quantify the economic effects of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy on e-commerce firms. We find that conversion-optimized Meta advertisements, affected most by ATT, saw a 37% reduction in click-through rates after ATT. While firms responded by shifting ad spend from Meta to the Google ecosystem, firms with higher baseline Meta dependence nevertheless experienced a 37% decline in firm-wide revenue relative to firms with lower baseline Meta dependence. These declines were primarily borne by smaller e-commerce firms, raising questions about the trade-offs between consumer privacy and the ability of smaller e-commerce and direct-to-consumer firms to succeed in the product market.