A pervasive tension between digital advertising’s past and its seemingly inevitable forward trajectory defines any retrospective review of 2024. On the one hand, the most prominent narratives in the space in 2024 pertained to legal and regulatory issues. The DMA became enforceable in early 2024; Apple’s DMA-related App Store changes were introduced at the start of the year and rejected by the European Commission midway through. Meta transformed its business model in the EU as a result of both the requirements of the DMA and pressure from the EDPB, and Google was forced to allow alternative app stores to be available in Google Play as a remedy in the Epic v. Google case.
And the trials for Google’s two antitrust cases in the United States dominated industry news throughout the year, with Google being found guilty in its Search case and the ad tech case concluding in November. Google’s back-and-forth with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over its planned deprecation of cookies in Chrome resulted in the company essentially instituting deprecation through a consent mechanism that may be introduced early next year.
While these developments are interesting and bring clarity and certainty to the business models that have historically defined digital advertising, it’s not clear to me how significant they are given the category’s wholesale realignment around artificial intelligence. AI is mostly responsible for Meta’s renaissance, which I detail in Meta’s turnaround and will unpack in a long-form podcast episode next month. AI is redefining the Search experience, as I note in Google’s gambit, and it has created opportunities for advertising platforms to extract significant value from scaled corpora of first-party data. Generative AI tools for creative production are being utilized widely, with Meta revealing in September that more than 1MM advertisers have used its AI-empowered creative tools.
So while several long-standing inquiries were resolved in 2024, the questions they addressed may not be relevant going forward. And as artificial intelligence penetrates every component of the digital advertising value chain and alters the economics and utility of first-party data and engagement capture, those previously uncertain but now decided issues provide little guidance for how the digital advertising market will evolve.
Below, I present the 10 most popular articles and podcasts published on Mobile Dev Memo in 2024.
Most Popular Articles
- Apple’s privacy “nuclear option”
- Why is Google killing cookies?
- Meta’s turnaround, and the opportunity and risks ahead
- The open web is whistling past the graveyard
- Google’s Network business is vestigial
- AppLovin’s Ascent
- AppLovin, Snap, and the new Walled Garden pathway
- Is Netflix’s advertising business a success?
- Digital Advertising, Demand Routing, and the Millionaires’ Mall
- Netflix, price discrimination, and the Goldilocks zone
Most Popular Podcast Episodes
- Understanding AppLovin
- Optimizing ad spend against LTV (with Eran Friendinger)
- The DMA, Personalized Advertising, and Digital Deglobalization
- Understanding AdAttributionKit (with David Philippson)
- How to run an analytics team (with Russell Ovans)
- The Streaming Advertising Showdown (with Adam Epstein)
- Taming the mayhem and pandemonium of X (with Trung Phan)
- Cookie deprecation and Privacy Sandbox (with Paul Bannister)
- All about the Digital Markets Act (with Lazar Radic)
- The privacy benefits of on-device processing (with Dieter Rappold and Felix Krause)
