Snap Says Its Ad Business Dropped After Apple Changed Rules

Snap is seeing its shares suffer after saying its growth might be stunted for the current quarter as a result of Apple’s recent privacy changes, a report from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) says.

The changes in question were made to Apple’s App Store and have presented new challenges for companies in terms of managing ad campaigns, Snap says.

The prediction caused the company’s share price to fall to $57 from around $75.

“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 ad partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS,” Snap said, per WSJ.

The social media company is now looking for a way out – through making new first-party tools to boost ad partners’ ability to track things.

Snap said on Thursday (Oct. 21) that its revenue for the quarter ending Dec. 31 will likely be around $1.17 billion to $1.21 billion, which would be a decrease from the $1.36 billion analysts expected.

Snap’s Snapchat app is popular with young people and has been an outlier among its peers during the past year and a half of the pandemic, in that it has usually had steady revenue and user growth. WSJ notes that the company has had several new business avenues, including a new feature called My Places, which gives personalized recommendations for people to eat or visit places based on interests of friends.

PYMNTS reported about the way Apple’s changes were affecting Snapchat, writing that Snapchat executives want to try and make success out of it all anyway.

Read more: Snapchat Says Social Commerce Reliant on Augmented Reality

According to CEO Evan Spiegel, the company will be looking to do even more work on augmented reality shopping experiences. The company wants to expand the work it’s doing to allow customers to try on clothing, beauty products and other such things.

Spiegel called augmented reality “one of our most exciting long-term opportunities” due to its early stages of development, but also the fact that hundreds of millions of people use it.