Would you pay for Facebook?

Back in January, I wrote about how Apple’s big play is privacy. With iOS 14.5 being released into the wild, the quasi-war between Facebook and Apple stepped up any gear. Anyone with an iPhone and who has updated to iOS 14.5 can now tell apps not to track their activity across installed apps and sites. This update will impact companies who use tracking data to provide hyper targeted ads. It will of course impact several advertising companies but Facebook has taken the battle to Apple once again and has said that this new update is anti-competitive. The spat hasn’t ended up in court like the Epic Games v Apple lawsuit which started this week.

Facebook and Instagram are trying to convince users not to opt out of tracking and are implying that iOS 14.5 prevents Facebook from making money and that tracking its users helps keep the service “free”.

So will we have to pay for Facebook?

It’s highly unlikely. Zucks has maintained that a version of Facebook will always be free. Besides, Facebook is financially stable with over $9.5bn net income in Q1 alone and another $64bn of cash and equivalents at hand. The loss of iOS tracking and impairment on ad revenue will be negligible. And of course, there are millions of Android users that this change does not affect so plenty of opportunities to still make money.

The reality of this update is that Apple users will likely see less relevant ads, not fewer ads. Facebook still gathers a significant amount of data on user behaviour within the apps so the ability to serve relevant ads based on user activity will remain. We just won’t be likely to see ads on items we just added to our shopping cart but never purchased. But if you are missing more targeted and relevant ads to your personal preferences, just keep the tracking on.