“Announcing Apple’s first foray into advertising back in 2010, company co-founder Steve Jobs promised a new vision of mobile advertising. The current one ‘really sucks,’ Jobs said,” John Paczkowski reports for Buzzfeed. “iAds would be better, serving up slick interactive ads inside iPhone and iPad apps without users having to leave the app they were currently using. And iAds did exactly that, but their high cost and Apple’s early control-freak stewardship of their development hamstrung their broad adoption.”
“Now, six years after launching iAd, Apple is stepping back from it,” Paczkowski reports. “Multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans tell BuzzFeed News that Apple is getting out of the advertising-sales business and shifting to a more automated platform.”
“While iAd itself isn’t going anywhere, Apple’s direct involvement in the selling and creation of iAd units is ending. ‘It’s just not something we’re good at,’ one source told BuzzFeed News,” Paczkowski reports. “And so Apple is leaving the creation, selling, and management of iAds to the folks who do it best: the publishers… Apple is phasing out its iAd sales force entirely and updating the iAds platform so that publishers can sell through it directly. And publishers who do so will keep 100% of the revenue they generate… iAd sales team members will be offered buyouts and released into the wild. The move is coming soon, perhaps as early as this week.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Now, if true, arriving at that realization took Apple a very long time.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Michael Giskin” for the heads up.]
“And publishers who do so will keep 100% of the revenue they generate”
That seems a bit weird. I would think Apple would take at least some cut to cover admin and infrastructure costs, let alone make a profit on their platform.
Apple is so far behind, they probably need to do something to juice the flow of ad’s. What’s the difference between letting the pub’s get 100% vs googly giving android away? (Apple’s cost will be a lot lot lower for iAd than googlys supporting android)
Once you go ZERO there’s no coming back.
This is Apple playing to its strengths as a platform provider as opposed to a content creator. This should have happened awhile ago, as in from the beginning.
“It’s just not something we’re good at,”
If they did say that, I’ll give them credit for honesty. Not something you normally see in the advertising business.
5% of the mobile market (compared to Googles 9.5%) sounds not too bad. Why give up, unless it’s losing money?