Despite Apple's privacy changes, Facebook posts record ad revenue

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By Joe Wituschek
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Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Facebook logo
Mark Zuckerberg in front of the Facebook logo (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Facebook announced its Q2 2021 earnings today.
  • The company revealed advertising revenue of $28 billion, a 56% year-over-year increase.
  • It did, however, warn that Apple's ATT will impact its ad business in Q3.

Despite Apple's anti-tracking privacy changes with iOS 14.5, Facebook is still making a ton of money with its advertising business.

Facebook held its Q2 earnings call today and announced that advertising revenue had passed $28 billion, a 56% year-over-year increase. Noted by Jason Kint, Facebook's CFO, David Wehner, said that the company expects to see an impact on its ad revenue in the third quarter rather than the second quarter.

"We continue to expect increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021 from regulatory and platform changes, notably the recent iOS updates, which we expect to have a greater impact in the third quarter compared to the second quarter."

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When questioned by analysts, on the call, Wehner said that Facebook has still not rolled out all of the new privacy changes that Apple released with iOS 14.5 back in April. Wehner did not say exactly what kind of impact the company expects from Apple's privacy protections but said it will be within their expectations.

"We're not fully rolled out with those changes, but Q3 will have the impact more or less of those meaningfully rolled out," he said.

The company also announced that employees wanting to return to the office will need to be vaccinated, following Google's announcement of the same thing from earlier in the day.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency enables users to choose if they want an app to track their activity across apps and the web. If the user asks an app not to track them, the service should disable their tracking for that user. A report from May found that 96% of users were opting out of tracking.

Joe Wituschek
Joe Wituschek
Contributor

Joe Wituschek is a Contributor at iMore. With over ten years in the technology industry, one of them being at Apple, Joe now covers the company for the website. In addition to covering breaking news, Joe also writes editorials and reviews for a range of products. He fell in love with Apple products when he got an iPod nano for Christmas almost twenty years ago. Despite being considered a "heavy" user, he has always preferred the consumer-focused products like the MacBook Air, iPad mini, and iPhone 13 mini. He will fight to the death to keep a mini iPhone in the lineup. In his free time, Joe enjoys video games, movies, photography, running, and basically everything outdoors.