Short abstract:

A central app-economy feedback loop fine-tunes advertising of apps/games to acquire users with greatest lifetime value (e.g. big-spending ”whales”). The paper examines Apple’s 2021 breaking of crucial aspects of the loop, and continuing subterranean material-political-economy struggle to repair it.

Long abstract:

Drawing on 106 interviews with practitioners of digital advertising, this paper focuses on free-to-play mobile-phone games (e.g. Candy Crush), and their relations to Facebook/Instagram, which are themselves mobile apps. It investigates a crucial feedback loop, which effectively fine-tuned app advertising – especially via Facebook’s machine-learning systems – to acquire users with greatest lifetime value (e.g. big-spending ”whales’).

Apps, though, are programs running on a platform, whose owner potentially possesses a form of Mann’s (1984) “infrastructural power.” Facebook and mobile games thus faced crisis with Apple’s 2021 requirement that apps gain users’ explicit permission for tracking. If users reject tracking (the great majority do), this materially breaks the feedback loop. However, subterranean material-political-economy struggle continues via low-profile but consequential efforts to repair the loop. Hunting for whales has become less precise, but continues.

The paper makes three contributions. First, it develops a “material political economy” approach to the digital economy, highlighting the importance of where, when and how things happen.

Second, although there are burgeoning literatures of app/game studies and on digital advertising, their intersection – advertising in and of apps/games – has been largely neglected (except by, e.g., Nieborg 2017).

Third, a dominant characteristic so far of digital advertising has been the individualization of users. Apple and Google are seeking to reverse this in specific ways, de-individualizing app (and web) users in the name of privacy. The paper will discuss the consequences of this for everyday work in advertising and the public-policy problems it raises.