Some kinds of businesses did. But the current version of a tech startup didn't. No, the world won't end, but we could be looking at significant economic changes.
Apple is a private company, they decided to limit the current mechanism through which adtech tracked people, and if people dislike it they can switch to more advertising-friendly devices. What I like about the current situation is everything is done freely - no law was passed to make Apple do it, nor make Meta use it.
As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works - and such education took decades - they are freely choosing devices that limit tracking, and when given the option to opt-out, are opting out at extremely high numbers. This tells you something about what consumers want.
Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
>As consumers start understanding exactly how adtech works
I can assure you that consumers do not. Even someone in this comment section of a technical form didn't know what attribution is which is an important part of how adtech works. Even from an extremely high level the prevalence of the phrase "XYZ is selling your data" despite that not happening is a clear sign that most people just parrot what they hear than actually understand. There has been a large amount of scaremongering about how bad this tracking is to people. This scaremongering drives more people to opt out than people opting out who actually understand how it works.
>Businesses would be more viable if they learned to market through mechanisms that were less distasteful to consumers.
That is not true. If the cost of that alternative marketing costs more than what you will make from doing it then the business is not viable.
It's a free market, someone can create a pro-advertising phone if they think it will be successful. Plenty of Android phones are chock full of terrible adware.
It's tough for businesses that thrived on the privacy-compromising features of early 21st century adtech. They can adapt or die.
I think this is missing a lot of nuances of digital advertising and the environment that business now operate in. The two major types of ads that used to exist were local and brand. Local is pointless for vast majority of today's digital businesses. Brand is very expensive from both a production and spend perspective, it is only suitable for already large businesses, there is also a lot of research that suggest it is very ineffective in actually generating sales for B2C.
Third option was to take out ads in a specialist publication to reach an audience that would mostly be aligned with your product (ie. business that makes chess boards taking out an ad in a chess magazine). This is probably the closest equivalent of targeted advertising today.
The barrier to entry for retail has dropped ridiculously with Shopify, allowing for niche and specialised retailers in a way that was previously not feasible. Acquiring new customers is still the hardest thing for a business to do, always has been and always will be, without the ability to reach new customers and connect with the audience who is interested in the businesses niche that is all dead in the water.
