The relationship between Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META) may not be ideal at the moment, but, according to The Wall Street Journal, at one point, Apple was in talks with the social network giant about how it could monetize its App Store presence.
Apple had claimed it was entitled to Facebook’s ad revenue
According to reports, Apple claimed that it was entitled to a part of Facebook’s advertising revenue. The WSJ reported that the particular advertisements in question were promoted posts, which allowed users to pay to have postings seen by more people. According to reports, Apple claimed that promoted posts were in-app buys, from which it usually takes a cut, while Meta said that they were advertisements from which Apple receives no cut. Meta appears to have prevailed.
Apple didn’t just want a cut of Meta’s increased revenue. The CEO of Tumblr’s parent business, Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, claims that Apple first rejected Tumblr’s newly unveiled boost-like function before the company made them available as in-app buys.
According to the WSJ, Apple and Meta also discussed a Facebook membership which might remove adverts from the social media platform. Apple might have benefited from this as well because it might have been able to generate income from subscriptions bought within the app. However, the proposals couldn’t be agreed upon by the two businesses. The talks primarily occurred between 2016 and 2018.
Apple and Meta have opposing ideologies regarding advertisements
The two firms now hold opposing ideologies when it comes to advertisements; Apple highlights privacy as a key distinction for its products, whereas Meta largely depends on ads to sustain its operations. Additionally, the “Ask App not to Track” prompt that Apple will roll out with iOS 14.5 in 2021 would substantially negatively affect Meta, losing the business $10 billion in ad sales in the previous year.
Officials at Meta also debated stopping the gathering of third-party information in 2018. Still, CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to keep most of its data-collection policies in place, according to the Wall Street Journal.
