In recent days, Facebook has presented financial results. The numbers have been very good. Facebook closed the quarter above analysts’ forecasts and with very positive revenue figures. Facebook’s revenue for the Morocco Mobile Database quarter stood at $ 28.07 billion, when analysts’ projections pointed to $ 26.44 billion. But, although Facebook presented good numbers, not everything was perfect when reading the accounts. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, indicated that the company was assessing how they could reduce the amount of political content that reaches feeds their users, as collected CNBC . 
In addition, and here is the interesting thing in advertising terms, Facebook charged against Apple for its privacy regulations and launched, in its text for investors, an alert on the risks in advertising. Facebook has pointed out that it sees Apple as one of its main competitors and that the privacy measures it has implemented in the latest version of iOS could affect how they segment ads and their ability in this area. “Apple may say it does it to help people, but the movements clearly follow its competitive interests,” Zuckerberg noted. The company anticipates that its competition against Apple and the battle for the market will intensify in the immediate future.
However, Apple is not the only problem. As noted in TechCrunch , Facebook has alerted investors that it anticipates “significant” obstacles to targeting and thus achieving the same positive revenue results. To Apple’s changes in its operating system, there are also adjustments in the “regulatory Brother Cell Phone List landscape.” Facebook also recognizes that consumer trends during the pandemic (the boom in online shopping and the need for more products and fewer services) have benefited its accounts, but that this could change after the pandemic. What is interesting, and what serves to understand the future of the market, is not so much that fear of a change in the wind, as the other reasons for your concern. These reasons are perfectly applicable to the market in general and can become a problem for many other players.
Apple’s pro-privacy measures (which turn their devices into an even more closed garden for non-users) are not the only ones that limit what marketers can do and what companies that live off network advertising can manage. . The decline of cookies, that soap opera of recent years, is another of them. Google has already made it clear that it will not give grace time and that Chrome will block cookies from next year. To this must be added that the authorities are increasingly concerned about privacy and consumers are more sensitive to the issue. Regulations such as the European data protection law are simply the beginning of what seems to be a greater tendency to protect information much more.
For the big players in online advertising, this growing concern for privacy is a problem, since it limits their room for maneuver. It is not the only one generated by public administrations. Concerns about the impact they have on the market and the pressure to determine whether or not they are monopolies could have clear effects on what they can and cannot do in 2021, also affecting their ability to serve advertising. The big names on the internet live off data and its power to offer highly profiled advertising based on it, but what will they do if they cannot access these sources of information? In fact, one of the issues raised by public administrations and which has been material for political debates is forcing big tech to fragment. Facebook, for example, would have to separate itself from WhatsApp and Instagram, which would hypothetically deal a major blow to how it knows consumers and how advertising serves them. All this invites us to reflect on the future of online advertising and, above all, on whether it will survive – or not – segmented advertising as we now know it.