Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 250 posts

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

#161

Post by shuckles »

vineyardmike wrote: post #139
shuckles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not track your activity across unrelated apps, websites, or the real world. They can offer personalized ads based on your interactions with Apple, which is not tracking, and they allow you to turn off that personalization. What rule are they exempting themselves from?

> They can offer personalized ads based on your interactions with Apple, Except apple has repeatedly claimed that everything on your iPhone including 3p apps is owned by apple.

Not sure what you’re referring to, and I doubt they’ve said they consider 3rd party app data as fair game for their own advertising targeting without invoking targeting.

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

#162

Post by Apocryphon »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #88
morcheeba wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what Stocks looks like - you scrolled down about two pages to get to the ad. You make it look like the ad is first. https://imgur.com/a/t7ncKoc

In any event, I am upset the advertisement is there at all.

Yeah, why does a first party app that embeds news stories, and not the official News app, have to display cheap clickbait interstitial ads?

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

#163

Post by fragmede »

nojito wrote: post #48
uncomputation wrote: post #24

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be track…

I’m surprised that people still call Apples stance a “story” 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.

But the scoop; the story here is that Apple has.

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

#164

Post by Deegy »

uncomputation wrote: post #24

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be track…

I own a small business that was crushed by iOS14. It sucks. At the same time I respect apple's dedication to privacy, even if it is profit motivated.

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

#165

Post by amf12 »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #105
fancl20 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two seperate facts: 1. Apple did use their market power crush small companies. 2. Facebook does have an awful privacy history. So the question is, do you think improving Facebook's privacy must hurt small companies? Another example, Google is working very closely with UK's Competition and Markets Authority to make sure the plan of replacing third-party cookies won't punch other companies at their faces.

These are not separate facts. FB and Google have a global surveillance network to track people which is 1) awful for privacy and 2) makes it easier to serve niche ads to people. Apple is prioritizing user-privacy which necessarily means it is more difficult for advertisers to place their niche ads. You can frame it as "crush small companies" if you want. But that framing is just as valid as "Apple's narrative". Third…

> FB and Google have a global surveillance network to track people

> Apple is prioritizing user-privacy which necessarily means it is more difficult for advertisers to place their niche ads.

Google provides the exact same privacy preferences on Android / Google ecosystem: the ability to enable/disable personalized ads, deviceId which is unique to the device, can be reset. The ability to delete your data automatically. It does not sell or share your data.

I don't like personalized ads, but we can't hail Apple for being a champion of privacy when its basically doing the same things Google does.

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

#166

Post by crtasm »

webmobdev wrote: post #137
uncomputation wrote: post #24

> But it crushed FB, Snap, and 1000s of small businesses in the process. Ironically, this is far more of a narrative than this guy’s idea of Apple’s “narrative.” The idea that banning user tracking hurts small businesses was FB’s narrative to try and get backlash against Apple for its tracking crackdown. That genuinely is a narrative because from Apple’s decision we have seen that consumers (1) prefer not to be track…

> What he calls Apple’s “narrative” is actually their substantiated history of privacy-protecting technologies. Not just tracking, but iCloud Private Relay, Hide my Email, iMessage E2E encryption, keeping many things on-device only. 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 an…

What data do you think they're mining from people using iCloud Private Relay?

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

#167

Post by warning26 »

jeppester wrote: post #124

Apple should either be forced to allow third party stores, or they should not be allowed to leverage their store to gain unfair advantages. Whether it's about forcing their SSO solution, forcing their payment solution, forcing their (inferior) browser engine, Apple apps showing up first in the store, or disallowing personalized ads only for third parties. I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they…

> I don't understand why anyone defend these practices when they are so obviously anti-competitive. But as usual lots of people think it's okay because Apple are the good guys and everyone else are the bad guys.

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

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

#168

Post by pessimizer »

reaperducer wrote: post #94
plantain wrote: post #68

> But it crushed [snip] 1000s of small businesses in the process. There's a lot of comments here suggesting this is a narrative from FB/Snap, but it really isn't. I was previously able to target adverts directly to the tiny audience of potential users of my product, and the return on those adverts was nearly 10x. Overnight it entirely evaporated as a source of new customers and I don't know how I'd build a niche busi…

Who was hurt? 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.…

> If you know your audience, then you already know the places where you should advertise.

And if your audience is a very odd niche, and you can't find where they congregate, go old school and make a place for them to congregate.

If you can't figure out how to market your wiener dog slide without facebook, create a weiner dog site with information about weiner dog health, pictures of weiner dogs, stories about weiner dogs, a weiner dog forum (or at least a link to a weiner dog forum you have created on reddit.) Slap your brand all over everything. Distribute other weiner dog products along with your weiner dog slide.

If you couldn't find anywhere on the internet that weiner dog owners congregate (and you really made an effort), eventually after you do this every weiner dog owner will know about you either directly or through word of mouth.

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

#170

Post by warning26 »

thumbsup-_- wrote: post #37

I don’t understand the point of this thread. Apple never said that advertising is bad. They just said tracking users across web is bad. When I use FB app, FB can still use my activity in their app to show me relevant ads, which they do. Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well. This is different from tracking and apple is giving a choice where FB and Goog…

> Apple can do the same but their prompt gives users the ability to turn that personalization off as well.

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.

Post reply on HN