With iOS 14.5, Apple introduced a new feature called ‘App Tracking Transparency’ that limited developers and advertisers from showing targeted ads to the users. It limited them from collecting data about the users’ app usage and showing ads based on it. Following the controversial move, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Snap predicted that their ad revenue will fall.

Now, Snap — the company which developed Snapchat — has announced that has missed its ad revenue target by nearly $3 million in the third quarter of 2021. Even though the company crossed $1 billion in revenue, and added more than 13 million daily users, Snap doesn’t look happy.

A more significant impact on our business than we had expected.

Though it hasn’t missed the target by much, Snap “expects” the impact to continue next quarter and in the long-term have a large effect.

In a statement, Snap’s chief business officer, Jeremi Gorman, said, “We grappled with industry changes to the way advertising is targeted, optimized, and measured on iOS that created a more significant impact on our business than we had expected.” In addition, Gorman says that Apple’s new SKAdNetwork (SKAN) solution hasn’t performed as expected.

“The initial results we observed using SKAN were generally aligned with prior industry-standard solutions, and we were among the first platforms to lean into this solution and push for widespread industry adoption. However, over time, we saw SKAN measurement results diverge meaningfully from the results we observed on other first and third-party measurement solutions, making SKAN unreliable as a standalone measurement solution,” said Gorman.

This “might be a preview of what’s coming,” reports The Verge. Twitter and Facebook are hosting their earnings call next week, and we might see similar results there as well. Snap, on its part, though, has started developing its own tool for advertisers called Advanced Conversations. The company says it is under development and “will take time to be fully adopted.”

Via: The Verge