Apple is looking to significantly expand its own advertising business in first-party apps such as Maps, Apple Books, and Apple Podcasts, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg News.
I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. And TV+ could generate more advertising with multiple tiers (just as Netflix Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. are doing with their streaming services).
That being said, I don’t anticipate Apple going back into the business of serving up ads inside of third-party apps—at least not soon. Apple tried and failed at that with iAd starting in 2010.
The effort to add search ads to Apple Maps has already been explored internally. Such a feature would probably work similarly to search ads in the App Store. For instance, a Japanese restaurant could pay money to rank at the top of local listings when users searched for “sushi.” If you’ve used Yelp, you already get the idea.
In the books and podcast apps, publishers could pay for their work to appear higher in results—or in ads placed throughout the apps.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple looks to be building a demand-side advertising platform (DSP) based on recent job listings as it builds its focused play for media dollars. It remains unclear if the intended DSP is meant only for serving ads on Apple’s properties (App Store) or if it could also be intended to work on third-party apps and/or sites.
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