Regulators in the US and Europe have added antitrust scrutiny such as pursuing Google for allegedly promoting its products over rivals. In December, Facebook owner Meta was served with a complaint from the EU’s watchdogs over concerns that the social network’s classified advert service is unfair to rivals.
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has blamed recent revenue falls on Apple’s privacy changes that make it harder to track users and target advertising, as well as the growing popularity of viral videos app TikTok, owned by Chinese parent ByteDance. “Before I joined, I didn’t even know what Amazon Ads was,” said an Amazon executive who says they now run “a massive team – and I didn’t know this existed before the recruiter called”.
Apple has also emerged as a new threat. Its ad revenues have grown from under $2.2 billion in 2018 to more than $7 billion this year. Zuckerberg has repeatedly hit out at Apple’s “conflict of interest”, criticising it of charging “monopoly rents” and stifling innovation. Apple’s privacy rules have made it difficult for Meta to tailor ads to people, contributing to its shares falling by about two-thirds over the past 15 months.
“Apple has a really strong brand that consumers trust and they have the devices that are used by the cream of the consumer crop,” said Josh Koenig, chief strategy officer at Pantheon, a digital marketing platform. “If they can figure out how to turn that into a real valuable network for advertisers, they’ll be able to charge a premium.”