App makers pursue walled gardens in reaction to Apple’s new privacy rules

Zynga, the maker of hundreds of iOS apps, is to buy the adtech platform Chartboost, in a move being widely seen as partly a reaction to Apple’s new privacy requirements.

In a change that has sent shockwaves through the ad industry, Apple now demands that every personal-data-tracking app explicitly asks users whether they want to opt out – a change that threatens to reduce ad personalisation, and so the revenue that app makers such as Zynga make from it.

The details

• The $250 million acquisition of Chartboost, reported by the Financial Times, will allow Zynga to bring the tech needed to personalise ads in-house, removing the need for it to share its data with third-party ad platforms.
• Chartboost says it reaches over 700 million monthly users and takes part in 90 billion ad auctions a month.
•  Zynga rival Applovin has taken a similar route, paying $1 billion for the adtech group Adjust earlier this year. And Zynga boss Fran Gibeau predicts other companies will also create so-called “walled gardens”, gathering data from their own user base and so allowing them to cut links with external ad platforms. 

Key quote

“Never let a good crisis go to waste. Through vertical integration and owning more of the ad network, [we] realised we’d get full data sets coming in” on users, creating the right environment for tailoring ads. Zynga chief executive Frank Gibeau to the FT.

Sourced from the FT