“We grappled with industry changes to the way advertising is targeted, optimized and measured on iOS that created a more significant impact on our business than we had expected,” Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer, said in an October analyst call. Still, the company’s revenue grew 57 percent from the same period a year ago, to $1,067 million, Ms. Gorman added.
Last month, Snap introduced new augmented reality shopping features that allow brands to add catalogs of merchandise to the Snapchat app. While users can try on glasses, makeup and apparel in augmented reality, brands receive insights about which items and styles are most popular.
In the past, Twitter has said that Apple’s privacy push caused minimal disruptions to its business because much of its advertising came from brand awareness campaigns and large events, like the Olympics, rather than targeted advertising. Twitter is set to report its fourth-quarter earnings on Feb. 10.
But Apple, which reported its fourth-quarter earnings last week, indicated that privacy was profitable. Despite supply chain disruptions, Apple said that sales of iPhones totaled $71.6 billion, up 9 percent from a year earlier. The smartphone maker reported an 11 percent increase in revenue and a 20 percent jump in profit.
Apple has made privacy a key part of its marketing for the iPhone and other products, giving customers the ability to opt out of tracking and providing steps to make tracking more difficult in its browser, Safari. But Apple has continued to allow apps like Facebook to track users in aggregate, as long as they do not seek to personally identify users.
Last year, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, making his company’s message clear, said that the advertising industry had become an ecosystem of “trackers and hucksters just looking to make a quick buck.”
