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Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

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Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#131
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple added SKAdnetwork specifically for the attribution use case, presumably because they foresaw this.

SKAdNetwork is severely restrictive. In my group we’re still forecasting a major hit to our ability to perform attribution or lift analysis.

Why can't attribution be solved by including a campaign ID in the links to the product the ad is selling, and then counting the number of purchases per campaign ID?

Is it because it's a manufactured problem by this scummy industry where they try to consider anything a "conversion" like "we showed this guy an ad 2 years ago and now he finally happened to look the right way at our client's shop while walking past it, this is definitely because of our ad and we should include this in our conversion stats"?

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple absolutely does abuse their power as a monopoly. I'm not sure how that's related to asking users for permission to share data with third parties, which is what this was about.

Apple is exempting itself from this policy, keeping its own tracking on by default: https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?... Previously, Apple and third-party tracking were both controlled by the same opt-put setting. Using your power as platform owner to turn your competitor’s ad tracking off by default while keeping yours on? Sure seems abusive to me.

Completely agree. I was not aware they were doing this too.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#133

Given the attitude on HN about iOS14, I don’t think most here grasp the implication of gutting ad attribution. All publishers (news sites, indie games, etc) are going to see huge drops in CPM. It could easily be a business ending shift. Sure removing IDFA will help protect user privacy, but let’s not kid ourselves that there will not be collateral damage. Being a third party publisher will be that much harder and wal…

I get the implications. It's not that I'm indifferent to them, it's that I'm actively happy about them.

I hope every company that makes a living by trying to spy on me goes out of business.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#134

In iOS 13, Apple and third-party ad tracking were both controlled by the same opt-out setting. In iOS 14, the settings have been split, with third party tracking disabled and and Apple’s tracking enabled by default. Blatant anticompetitive behavior to promote their own tracking services in the guise of protecting users. Genius move by Apple. https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...

To what extent is this really "tracking"? Apple's ads are served only in a few of their own apps, like the App Store and News. They're only tracking you across their own services, no differently than Facebook or Google could do in iOS 14, right?

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#135
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that was really the case then why are FB and Google fighting it so hard? Shouldn’t they want this then?

I believe it will still comprise a reduction in their revenue. The internet as a whole will be less profitable, and only the big players will be able to survive. Maybe with time there can be a shift in the economics, but I would not bet on it. I can’t imagine people will start paying for email, search, music streaming...

> I can’t imagine people will start paying for email, search, music streaming...

There's absolutely now reason why these services can't all fit in a 5-10$/month allowance. E-mail is already ~2$/month with Office 365, and if everyone starts paying economies of scale would make even cheaper plans profitable.

Some of these services can just as well be provided by the ISP, like e-mail was back in the days. A lot of ISPs are indeed scum but there isn't technically anything forcing the users to use them (you can pay for a third-party) and I think the move away from e-mail being centralized around a few giants like Google (GMail), Microsoft (Outlook), etc would be a good thing.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#136
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers are willing to pay way more for targeted ads. If an app is relying on advertising revenue, the inability to target ads will directly cause the app to generate less revenue.

The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising, so that marketing budgets can realign to appropriately pay for normal advertising again. As it is, the efficacy of targeted advertising is a myth. Google claimed in a blog post that their own internal study showed over a 50% benefit in targeted advertising for publishers... but an independent, academic study showed a difference of about 4%. https://techcrunch.com/2…

>The solution here is to outlaw targeted advertising

Thanks, but no. As an end user, my preference goes as:

no advertising >>>>> targeted advertising >> untargeted advertising

And I am not just speaking hypothetically. Google has a switch in your account settings where you can flip a toggle to turn off all targeted Google advertising and make it un-targeted. I couldn't last more than a day with this and flipped the toggle back on.

While with targeted advertising, most ads were useless, they at least were somewhat relevant, and a few even piqued my interest. With untargeted advertising, I was getting absolute trash that was actively annoying me.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#137
post #130

In iOS 13, Apple and third-party ad tracking were both controlled by the same opt-out setting. In iOS 14, the settings have been split, with third party tracking disabled and and Apple’s tracking enabled by default. Blatant anticompetitive behavior to promote their own tracking services in the guise of protecting users. Genius move by Apple. https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...

That looks like iOS 14- I don't see that separation in 13.6

Correct, there was a typo in my comment. I edited to add “14”.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#138

In iOS 13, Apple and third-party ad tracking were both controlled by the same opt-out setting. In iOS 14, the settings have been split, with third party tracking disabled and and Apple’s tracking enabled by default. Blatant anticompetitive behavior to promote their own tracking services in the guise of protecting users. Genius move by Apple. https://twitter.com/eric_seufert/status/1291730115253145600?...

To what extent is this really "tracking"? Apple's ads are served only in a few of their own apps, like the App Store and News. They're only tracking you across their own services, no differently than Facebook or Google could do in iOS 14, right?

This seems like a poor equivalence when Facebook and Google aren’t allowed to run an App Store on iOS, and Apple also boosts News, Music and other services by bundling and exempting them from the 30% revenue cut that competitors are subject to. Overall, the big picture is Apple is leveraging their power of platform owner to advantage their other businesses at the expense of competition and ultimately the consumer.

The big money at stake in this particular change is ads promoting the installation of apps. Facebook’s current tracking allows them to show that a particular ad FB displayed resulted in spending on an app. Apple taking over this business with their own ad service is just another aspect of their efforts to capture an ever-expanding chunk of commerce that occurs on every iOS device. Keep in mind the context that Apple is banning apps for allowing users to use subscription services without paying Apple 30% of the subscription revenue.

For what it’s worth, Google is guilty of some of the same issues on Android. I hope any regulation cracking down on these abuses will be equally applied.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, at one time you could build apps on Facebook that basically downloaded all of a user's data when they used it. The Obama campaign built an app that you could use to find your Facebook friends who hadn't been contacted by the campaign yet, so you could call them on the campaign's behalf. I heard of other political operations that built a "wish [famous person] happy birthday" app solely so they could grow their…

Wasn’t this closed in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

This type of FB app was gone long before the CA scandal broke. There were some really cool ones available, but plainly not worth the tradeoff in retrospect.

Re: Preparing Our Partners for iOS 14

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t this closed in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

A person associated with Cambridge Analytica used a researcher access and shared the data with the company (which he wasn't supposed to do). Researchers have (had?) more access than developers do.

Not true, they didn't have any special research access. There was an app called "This is your digital life" that was just a personality quiz that they used to scrape data. At this point facebook would let you access data about a users friends in detail when the user would authorize it (via these apps).

Also facebook killed this long before the Cambridge Analytics scandal broke. It also enabled some really cool features like their graph search where you could run queries like "people in X town that like football", but it also let you run very creepy queries to stalk people, which is why it got canned.

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