In reports that came late night on Thursday, October 22, Snap Inc. has lost more than 25% of its share value in the stock market. Losing more than a quarter of a company’s value is no small feat but it is not unprecedented either.
Investors depend on company earnings as proof of confidence in the overall stability and well-being of a firm. Snap Inc. however, has been losing money due to Apple’s new security policy that prevents companies from targeting ads towards customers via their data.
The quarter 3 revenue report released by Snap Inc. showed that the company earned $1.07 billion in revenue instead of the predicted $1.2 billion, by Wall Street analysis. Despite there not being a huge difference between expectations and actual earnings, investors seemed shaken up as the company might see prolonged differences in earnings due to the new security policy that applies to all Apple users.
The privacy feature by the name of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) was a part of the latest update in iOS by Apple. It is a security feature that gives customers more power over who can track their activity via the app. Third-party app tracking allows many apps to collect data from the user that is then used to target and send them ads according to their interest.
With the new privacy feature, however, Apple users have the authority to either allow or deny any app to track them whenever they download it on the phone.
Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel talked about the impact of the privacy policy on Snap revenue saying, “While we anticipated some degree of business disruption, the new Apple-provided measurement solution did not scale as we had expected, making it more difficult for our advertising partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS.”
Snap Inc. is not the only tech company to get affected by disrupted ads. Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet are all among the big names that faced losses in share value after Snap’s revenue reports went public.
