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NumberEight bet on Apple's ID shutdown
The expected shutdown
NumberEight is a European data company whose software runs inside mobile apps. When it entered the ad-data space, IDs were about to be deprecated on mobile, with Apple's IDFA access coming to an end and cookies expected to follow. A whole range of companies were building for that world, and NumberEight believed the change would revolutionize the industry.
It did not arrive as a single switch. Signal loss is still ongoing, but there was no day when everything shut off and everyone transitioned.
The pivot to podcasting
With the lever missing, the company spent its time talking to other companies about their limitations and working out what it could do. That forced a pivot. Its work had been mostly in mobile and gaming, and it carried the same technology into podcasting, where data is scarce and fragmented and there was plenty to generate, more easily than in other spaces. Podcasting became one of its biggest successes.
Why did Apple restrict its advertising ID?
Apple introduced the IDFA, its Identifier for Advertisers, in 2012 so apps could be tracked for advertising without exposing a device's permanent serial number. With iOS 14.5 in 2021, Apple's App Tracking Transparency feature required apps to ask permission before reading it. Apple presented the change as a privacy measure. Meta said in its early 2022 earnings report that the change would cost it about 10 billion dollars in revenue that year.
Why did the end of cookies keep slipping?
Google announced in January 2020 that Chrome would phase out third-party cookies within two years. The date moved back several times as regulators and advertisers pressed for alternatives. Safari and Firefox had already blocked third-party cookies by default, in 2020 and 2019 respectively, so the shift happened browser by browser.
Why is podcast listening data so fragmented?
Podcasts are published to an open RSS feed that dozens of apps and players read, with no single login tying them together. A hosting company can count downloads of an episode file, but it cannot see whether anyone pressed play. Apple and Spotify can see their own listeners, though neither sees the other's. Industry download standards, such as the one certified by the IAB Tech Lab, count requests for files instead of people.
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