David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…What ended up actually happening from ATT, it’s been value destructive overall because I don’t think the amount of money that has shifted away from Facebook has been captured by Apple. I get the sense that the app install business for the app store, those search ads is going great, but it’s not equivalent to what the monetization over at Meta is on app install ads or was on app install ads. I think Apple was hoping in its heart of hearts that this would shift a lot of those dollars into ads in the app store, and the reality is people just don’t go to the app store searching for apps anymore. Not to mention this kneecap Meta on a lot of ads that are not app install ads. We have a friend that’s in the retail business who was saying that their ads doubled in price in 2022 when this happened. They were scratching their head, and they have nothing to do with the app store. All that happened is that entrepreneur said, I guess I’m going to keep advertising on Facebook as a platform. I hope it gets better. I’ll pick some other platforms, but I can’t advertise with Apple. There’s nothing for me to do. It’s a retail good, it’s a physical item, so I guess I’ll just pay more money to acquire customers now. It ends up actually hurting the business when go-to-market channels get less efficient unless you can shift that spend to a place where your customer is also hanging out. In practice, Meta is fine. When a shift like this happens, the most scale player with the most engineers and the most data turns out they’re still the winner. Meta launched this thing called Advantage Plus, and now if you’re an advertiser they use a whole bunch of other data signals. You still have a customer acquisition budget, you’re going to spend it, you’re probably going to go spend it on Meta the same where you were before, and it’s just not quite as efficient as it was. Oh and by the way, anyone else that got hurt from the changes with ATT, just doesn’t have the ability to react and build around it the way that Meta had because they don’t have the resources Meta does.…

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