🤬​ Meta is NOT back on iOS. We have been FOOLED!

So yeah, that's what happened last week.
So Meta is not back on iOS and we have been fooled.
Yes,
pretty much. Okay.
And what so so what's happened other than Meta didn't still did their tracking homework for 2021?
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As usual. As usual. Hello everybody.
Hello. Well, wait. Like, [music]
hey, welcome. This is an emergency episode. Yeah, I guess. Oh, no. No, not emergency, but it's like it's very hot topic because Facebook came back from dead. It didn't. Yeah, except
Yeah, I I could I could take it from here, right? But, you know, hello everyone. I'm Felix Brawberg. My name is Matthew and I'm
and we are your hosts and this is an emergency episode of the two and a half for gamers podcast because as I reported on LinkedIn on Friday which got a lot of traction
ETA is back on iOS or so I thought. So to give us a little bit of context why it's important and what actually happened and what we're going to talk about on this emergency episode,
we have to go back to the beautiful date of April 26, 2021. And what happened on this date was that Apple introduced the app tracking

transparency, also known as AT. What they actually did was all the tracking on iOS used to go through something called the IDFA. Every iOS device had an IDFA which was used a lot in UA and was super effective for basically targeting. This basically meant that Meta grew extremely large and was doing a bulk or pretty much the majority of UA spending on iOS. Apple didn't like that very much. So they introduced kind of in the name of privacy that users have to opt in to basically having the IDFA or unique identifier tracking. Right.
Sure. Sure. But that kind of naming of the whole thing is I don't think Apple didn't like Facebook and spending. I think it was more connected to like flooding of the store with hyper casual games rather than just Facebook. Sure.
Also, there was some kind of beef. Yeah.

Yeah. Some kind of beef.
Yeah, there was some kind of beef. So,
Meta was the network that was the largest impacted by this. And even in their own quarterly earnings, Meta even reported that their audience network would be disproportionately impacted because of these privacy changes because their models relied really heavily on taking the IDFA from their Apple devices and combining it with the data on Facebook for their targeting. So I guess look alikes and stuff like that was all built on this meaning that Facebook if they lost this signal had a big disadvantage. So this meant that iOS traffic Meta used to be the largest or second largest network in terms of monetization. So they were taking up a large share revenue. They basically went from being the largest network to being one or 2% of a stack. Right? smallest.
I was managing Tetris at the time
and I saw on iOS we were probably making around 50 or 60K a day in ad revenue right on iOS and Meta was probably responsible for about 30 or 35k of that

and over the course of two weeks that revenue dropped down to about $400 a day. So if you extrapolate that it's quite big big drop right so the interesting thing that happened in this time right it's a couple of things that happened was that a lot of networks dropped and eCPMs on iOS pretty much dropped to about 25% of what you saw on Android for about 2 weeks and then afterwards networks started coming back but not Facebook so the kind of assumption here is that all networks started doing fingerprinting where essentially they group together a bunch of other data and they actually build big models based on what users are doing from other apps and what kind of device types they have. Then
once again you're not allowed to do that. iOS is the thing that they banned in the first place with IDF.
Exactly. But they don't enforce it really. So
yeah, Ben is a very strong wording

friend there
cuz within 3 weeks I'm seeing the these the Tetris numbers when I was managing cuz within 3 weeks like ECPMs were back to about like 15% of the previous one before this whole thing happened. So must have been some fingerprinting also kind at the same time when ATT started happening meta dropped from like I said 30k a day on this app that I was managing to 400 and at the same time I just looked up right Apple search ads [laughter] which is of course Apple's own advertising network that's inside of yeah the app store. It launched in 2016 and it made about a h 100red million in the first year and in 2018 it had grown to about half a billion in revenue. Now in 2021 this was launched revenue on Apple search ads went up to 3.7 billion and then in 2022 went up to 5 billion. So uh

I I don't know like matcha how yeah maybe you can talk a bit about search ads and I can keep this intro going on what's
quite bad still it's quite bad still for games especially for for apps it makes sense and also apps have been growing for some time and this might be connected rather than just uh to Facebook and the AT afterwards but of course like this was the move for just kind of pushing their own UA channel although
this is basically Apple saying that you cannot do this privacy things but only we can do it
kind of they have they would never admit that but it's like if you have a brain yeah
yeah you can connect the dots yeah what's going on
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That's so the biggest thing was that you know Facebook completely lost out on this and that has led to the fact that now the most dominant network on iOS is app right. So app has grown significant. Can we just put a time stamp on this please because we went like through so many
21 meta goes to near zero on iOS right and then since 2021 app has been growing significantly and they're kind of back turf I would say now is iOS is where they do extremely well correct me

correct me if I'm wrong mate there I'm not a fan
that's true on UA side absolutely yes
but it's just like it's a granular increase it's not like a problem was killing it so much from 2022 now it's just like for last year like they're really killing it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Also, in terms of monetization, isn't also like Google quite strong still on iOS?
Not really
really.
If you look in if I look in stacks now, right, like usually if you're on Macs, right, 40 to 50% is always AppLab and especially on iOS. Google is going to be about 20% of that, but they're not as big on iOS as you think, right? And that's kind of been the prelude why AppLin has also launched this e-commerce product. Historically, e-commerce UA spend goes to two main sources if you have an e-commerce. And e-commerce spend dwarfs pretty much any gaming spend, right? Because it's the biggest like spending online. So, Google and Meta have pretty much had a nice duopoly for

the last couple of years or the last decade I would say in terms of e-commerce spend. And now AppLoving has been growing that so much. They talk about it in the end of year like earning or they they talk about it in their like quarterly earnings every time. It's estimated by some analysts that they're basically getting two or 3% of the e-commerce spend now, which is large. So now Google and Facebook are being like, "Hey, they're coming in on our turf. What can we do to fix that?" And that's why everyone kicked up such a big fuss this week because on the 28th and 29th like I met us earn like share revenue in some of my clients accounts or in all of my clients accounts pretty much went from I have one client where it's went from being $200 a day where it's been since 2021 and it basically shot up to earning nearly 5k a day. Right? So it shot up from being 2% to almost 22% in that account and that's pretty much mirrored across the board. Thursday,

Friday, this kind of revenue just shot up like crazy. And it was widely thought that what actually happened was that Meta launched what they've been talking about for so long, which is their kind of AT tracking framework, taking them back on iOS because they're so large that they actually want to compete with AppLabin head-to-head. And that's why everyone was getting super excited because basically Meta's eCPMs in the states average eCPM that on this app that I was or game I was managing is $43 in the states. Meta's eCPM for those two days came in at $73. So it was wildly like higher than anything else, right? So everything was looking great. Everyone's like, "Oh my god, Facebook is back. That means we're going to be earning finally higher eCPMs. The competition is back. Matthew got excited because of U implications. You can start doing UA on iOS with meta

again. More channels. I don't know.
I've been doing UA UF with meta for for years. And I've been one was always saying like, hey, actually Facebook and iOS is great.
Because it was really working because after happened and all the IDFA shenanigans, everybody just shut their pants. is like, "Oh my god, we can't spend because we have no idea." It was almost like 2000 mobile again. I mean, it was like nobody was spending. It's like, "Oh my god, like these numbers are amazing." So, you know,
most UA managers didn't spend on iOS on meta, right?
It's hard to say. I think it's if we had this discussion maybe three years ago, I would say not really. But now it's just it's I mean they've been doing all these different advancements measurements again, mobile measurements and aggregate and even measurement and whatever else on Facebook side which is a little bit more UA topic which definitely helps kind of with the UA on on Facebook. So there's no scan anymore like nobody cares about that [ __ ] because it's it's useless. So there's like all these kind

of model conversion. Let's call let's not call it Frankie fingerprinting because they they can't do it because they're a big company for whatever reason, but it's called modeled conversions.
It works really well. So,
model conversions like fingerprinting but like with a wink
maybe. No, I mean it's not there but it's like well they should definitely go into that.
Do I get the right that Meta should have done this?
Yeah. 10 years ago. Why when applian did this like 2021
exactly
basically and their own fault for being late
and then AppL would probably not be such a big company as it is right now because
Yeah. Because that's their own fault for creating this rival of a company basically.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
So what also happened on these two days, right, the the thing that was really interesting was because the meta share revenue increased so much, right? If you go from 2% to 22%, you got to have losers as well, right? So in the stacks that I look in which is quite a large portion of mobile impressions that I see

right so the biggest loser was unity so it's like had a big implication on their vector roll out right
and then also applovin so the two networks that meta was taking a lot from was unity and apploven
for two days
and then the complaints started coming so we start first started seeing on some accounts late Friday afternoon that retention rates kind of had dropped kind of the same time as this kind of came out with the meta roll with basically meta rolling out and increasing demand. So then what we started doing was we started looking at the end cards inside of the apps that we're managing, right? And what actually happened is that Facebook hasn't launched any tracking cuz the share of revenue on nonIDFA traffic increased slightly but not a lot, right? So, it's on IDFA traffic, but what changed was they rolled out the most aggressive end cards I've ever seen. [laughter]

I get it right that they still didn't do their homework.
No,
they just changed the end card.
No,
no, but this is one of the kind of stepping stones to that. Yeah.
Homework.
Yeah. So, we've talked about many times on this podcast, right, how mobile ads is a race to the bottom, right, for both the content and the end cards and the creative length, right? But what are the biggest predictors of conversions is what I always argue is how long are ads and how annoying are they to click out of, right?
So, for
So, everybody is doing more and more annoying ads.
Yeah, exactly. So for the last 3 years, Meta has been the only company, even Google changed their end cards to be more aggressive. And Meta was the only one that didn't allow to do it. So they updated and changed their end cards to be harder to click out of. And even one template that loads two ads in a row, which is why their eCPM was so high. And the fact the fact that this test that

they've they've been doing for some time already for these end cards, let's say rumor on the street has that this is the biggest impact on the overall like engagement/revenue for a feature of this kind of scale that they've seen. Let's well exactly they haven't seen since like the beginning of the company. Like seriously, this was the highest impact they've ever seen for any type of test or feature.
That's interesting. Where are you getting that from?
I've just, you know, I'm walking around the street of San Francisco sometimes and then suddenly like a bird whispers this into my into my ear.
I won't say like the exact number of the like improvements and increase that they they've seen, but this is what few people told me. The funny thing is, you know, I've had to spend a large portion of my Friday evening to basically try to get Meta to reduce these end card templates because it gives them a really unfair advantage, right?
Who are you talking to? Like these people, they don't exist anymore.

Basically, what also happened was in 2022, they let 400 people go from Facebook audience network, right?
There was a restructuring like restructuring, right? Even UA gaming reps, they don't exist anymore. Like serious like it's like the the whole re reorg stuff happened and they just like there's literally no one like support like zero talk talk to the to the like AI chat chat bots pretty
my clients are large enough that they still have an account manager for this but yeah it's still yeah if you're not a large client this sucks for you
everybody went to the reality labs division and then after that fella to the AI division now yeah
well sure but the thing I don't know about that, right? But yeah.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, there was supposed to be like a like a funny funny moment from from Yakub.
Yeah.
So, so here is one of the ad formats that they have now. And it looks very simple, but these small things really matter, right? So, you have the the

what's it called? The SK overlay that comes at the bottom that you can click through, which they didn't have before. It was just a video that played.
Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't there.
Royale.
Okay. This real
she's talking
German. Yeah, German German version of the
Yeah, German version, right?
Is this like a a real money gaming?
Yeah, it is. And then here you have the end card that you can actually use and play around with with an X button. And that's one of the end cards.
This is like the end card. Like this is more like like an interactive.
Yeah, interactive playable, right? Yeah.
So the crazy end card
this is I can you can move around, right? So then you go through and then it comes up again with SK overlay.
So it's a playable
and you can sit. Yeah, it's a playable at the end or interactive end card, right? But it's also harder to click out, right? So you can move and play around with it.
Can you actually move the card there?
Yeah. Yeah, you can. Yeah.
So it's a playable.
But this is Yeah, exactly. It's like this like playable.
So I told my boss I made a [music] playable app with playable maker
and he said to me, "What language did

you code it in?" And I said, "I don't know. With Playable Maker, all you do is drag, drop, click, and it does it all for you." So he again, he [music] said, "What language did you make it in?" I mean, I don't know, English. At the end of the day, as long as a playable maker does it all for you, why do you [music] care? It's just like magic.
Playable. I don't
exactly. So, this is one of the two that you can do, but there's also another one that I wasn't able to record, which is exactly a copy of the Google end card where they play two ads in a row. So, basically, they can take two AUA creatives in a row. And this is what caused this big spike, right? But the fact is that nonIDFA traffic is pretty much flat, right? So it's still only bidding on IDFA traffic. But this small little thing, especially in the start, because people aren't used to seeing this particular one, they convert crazy high levels. It's the same thing like when you have a game and you have a new feature or [clears throat] something and it basically spikes for a couple of days and then drops back down because I'm back to baseline.

Why?
I'm back to baseline.
But but why? But like what's what's the point? Like when you have a new end card and then like you you go up then there should be
so they basically doubled the number of ads per impression which increased conversion. No [ __ ] because people just saw more ads.
No, they did both double the amount of ads inside of their creatives while also making it harder to click click out. So you also increase the amount of conversions.
Exactly.
Yeah. Right.
Then why only for a couple of days? That's what I'm not done. So basically what I've been doing now is right if I have a client right we basically you or it's like if you have a game it's really quite important for you to have all your networks on the same creative length and end card formats right because otherwise it's a fair unfair advantage so you give clear direction
was unfair advantage
why app on 30 seconds and then Facebook on 60 seconds then Facebook is going to get more kind of impression afterwards and yeah and then conversions later and then more money obviously.

Okay.
But it's not not fair because Applavin is already like kind of like almost with one like per pretty much.
Yeah.
Right.
So yeah, what I've been spending my time doing now is basically getting to Facebook and removing these end cards to being like, "Hey, that's not fair. We need par. So you need to change that back and then the performance drops." But also like users, they get used to seeing these type of end cards, right? So it's like if you add a new rewarded placement in your game for example, you usually will see for the first two or three days like a really high spike and then it drops back down to baseline because people get used to it, right?
So we're pretty much back to baseline across the board on all the accounts, right? But I believe that this is probably an indication from Facebook that they're going to maybe come back in iOS at some point because they have been talking about three years but haven't done it. Yeah.
Yeah. question. Doesn't making or like forcing people to watch double the amount of ads has an impact on their

engagement, I mean retention. Yeah, that's why I saw my retention rates go down, right? That was the first clue that something was up because if you have the most aggressive ad formats and then usually like you lose a couple percent on retention as a result because they're super annoying.
So basically like same effect as like putting in interstitials. What
you see more ads basically you were used to like this is just seconds that this ads ends and then another comes in and you cannot go out away from it so it's like a you know
I would say that's too harsh
of course interstitial is another level of that because you don't click it as a rewarded video or whatever you know what I mean
interial end cards were also changed here Jakob is both rewarded and interstitial like both video and forms yeah
so yeah that's what happened last week so Yeah.
So, Meta is not back on iOS and we have been fooled.
Yes,
pretty much. Okay.
And so, so what's happened other than Meta didn't still did their tracking

homework from 2021 and they're back to the baseline and everybody's now turning off these extremely aggressive ad formats, end cards, and whatever just said. That's it.
Yeah, they added end cards. That's what happened. End cards.
I mean, like people are turning them off because they're causing retention churn. Yeah. Yeah, most people can't, right? But yeah.
Why do you mean can't?
Because they can to talk to.
Yeah, you can't talk to anyone. It's like one of those like you need to ask for this.
Yeah, exactly. You need to ask for it. Like these are
there there's there's one network.
Is it lift? I think it's lift. It's like liftoff where like the blocking feature inside of the dashboard. Usually it's like you can upload and block any apps, but here you usually have to ask an account manager to unlock that part in your dashboard. Like there's so much of this stuff in Admon. Like if you don't know, you get absolutely shafted.
I hate this Admon stuff. Like, oh, you didn't know this? You should ask your rep.
Yeah. Like,
well, yeah, but he or she doesn't exist. Yeah. It's like that's another level. There's another level.

Okay. Okay, fine. So then what's next?
What's next steps? Yes.
Yeah. What's next? What's next? For
get your get your rep to talk to you. That's number one. has been telling us large publishers for the last 3 years that just keep look out soon. We're going to launch nonAT tracking soon. Just keep a look at it. It's coming. And they've been saying that every year for 3 years, but they haven't launched it, right? And you're hearing rumors that is 70% as good as their at like non uh like as their IDFA tracking. and you hear a bunch of stuff and you've been hearing it for so long that this time when I'm told it, it's just like, yeah, I believe it when I see it.
No, man. Like the same thing with others campaigns, right? It's like, oh, we are working on the other campaign for so long because it's going to be 3x better than everything that's on the market. Launches and it's [ __ ] Launches an update and it's still [ __ ] Great. I mean, that's first thing. And then like, okay, where where's like the iOS campaign coming? Oh, next quarter. Next

quarter. This is I think the fifth quarter already. This is coming next quarter. So yeah, exactly. So I think this is going to be corrected.
Are did you see any like uptick in campaigns on iOS on those two days?
I was really Yeah, I was really
28th 29th is really when you had the
Yeah,
I was really looking for like that kind of information so I can share like oh my god it looks amazing. It just not it doesn't really I I don't think it's changed that much. Let me check. We were so happy for two days because literally it looks like, you know, we're earning 20% more ad revenue, right? So, it's like great.
Yeah. No, I mean,
so good to be true.
No change whatsoever. I have better numbers for yesterday than the whole week because I mean it's weekend so I guess that's fine. And I I also added new creatives which definitely helped with the performance. Not end cards but creatives. So, but yeah. No, no, no, not big change honestly.
Yeah. Yeah, which is which is which is weird because yeah, I mean besides the

fact that LinkedIn was all over like the Meta is back on iOS thing, we almost all believed like it actually is happening.
We wanted to believe I wanted to believe it. We really need more competition, right? And we've been told it so many times from Facebook. It's just like then you see revenue increasing from 2% to 22%. You're like,
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need Let's see. Okay, I can I can do one more thing which is maybe just placement drill down for this instead of just only day and see if I have more kind of a network. But no network absolute zero seriously like [sighs] it's just so bad. I mean doesn't really still exist unfortunately. So no yeah no increase on traffic in here and it's like I'm checking like multiple accounts honestly. So, well, it's going to be some time until this happens. But honestly, look, I think Facebook is a road in my prediction is going to be

climbing back to the top of the UA channels kind of very aggressively competing with applian
as well.
This is a first indicator because they can't do that without launching end cards, right? So it makes sense to do this before launching anything else
because you do really need this to compete today. Like even when Maloco first started becoming a big network on mobile, they had no end cards and suddenly they launched them and they became even bigger, right? And yeah.
Yeah. It's like the thing is even if you have like this old playbook of 2021 or 2020 or whatever, it just doesn't work like that anymore. And especially on Facebook, it's still I believe like they Facebook can find like new incremental players and new audiences and new new basically, but you need to be able to kind of know how to make it happen, which I was talking about the signal engineering and then all of the different things which is very important. And I'm not I'm not going to

talk about the web two app again. We talk that over
because I mean because this is like even more important because everybody's using it on iOS and the combination of web. Did anyone say web revenue? Oh yeah. This episode is brought to you by Fastpring, the no drama D2C partner that's been scaling with mobile publishers for over 20 years. They're fast growing, profitable, and seriously reliable, which is more than you can say about most vendors in this space. Anyway, whether you're launching a new web store, replacing your current system, or adding a backup plan, Fast Spring is here for you. Visit fastspring.gg to set up your web store today. Fastpring.gg. Hello fast brain. Thank you very much guys for sponsoring this episode.

Traffic iOS and aggregated measurement where you can get more signals. That's where the [ __ ] is happening. So yeah, but I'm not going to go there because this is not the the right episode for it.
I think uh we've talked this kind of to death. I think we could end here unless you have any other questions you want to discuss.
No, I think that's just pretty much clear. But we need to again highlight like this is not the final state and this is not the end game and we were happy for a short period of time. I'm I'm really curious to see like what's going to happen next because everybody was so joyful on for
Facebook comes back on iOS. It has huge implications for both Unity and Applan, right? So yeah, like massive. So yeah.
Yeah. Then we're going to really check what's going to happen with Facebook/Meta in the ne near future and it's going to be fun.
All right. Yeah, that's it pretty much.

Yeah,
thanks for tuning in for this emergency episode. We always aim to make you step stay two and a half steps ahead of the indust of the mobile industry. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you also want to stay two and a half steps ahead of the industry. Please comment. Tell us how much your revenue your ecnm/revenue spiked on these two days and if it's if it's actually still holding up. Yeah, exactly.
Cuz I was I was also sharing like my obviously not the great and big revenue app business yet.
Yeah, bro. Like you're on like $20 a day. Like you're not going to see it. [laughter] Well, but still if if there is a spike and I and I added new app and add monetization there was a spike and then it kind of flatlined afterwards but there was a spike at least
in here
I should be able to see some spikes which I wasn't but I still I mean
tell you what m I'll take a look at your admon stock if you want and see if everything is set up correctly.

I'll do that gladly for you.
Sure. Sure. Sure. I've I've heard that so many times. Never happened. Never [laughter] happened. never happened. So, and with that, thank you very much for tuning in again. See you next time.