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Apple Steps Back from Its iAd Advertising Business

86 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

Animats 11y ago
Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Apparently it doesn't mean less ads. Apple is just outsourcing.
micheljansen 11y ago
Now let's hope that this means Apple will no longer have a conflict of interest when it comes to selling eyeballs or user data.
- givinguflac 11y ago
  Do you have an example of Apple "selling user data" ? Because I don't think you do.
  - micheljansen 11y ago
    Nope, Apple has actually taken a pretty strong stance against such practices, but being in the ad business meant there has been pressure on Apple to do just that (after all, more personalised ads perform better, and Apple has all the means to provide advertisers the data they need to offer them). Now that they have left the advertising business, that pressure is hopefully also gone.
tdkl 11y ago
Planned obsolescence is way more profitable anyway.
- mamon 11y ago
  I don't know what do you mean by "planned obsolescence" in context of Apple products. I constantly see people using few years old iPhone 4S or 7 years old MacBooks. If by "obscolescence" you mean the fact that they release new and better product every year then that's nothing that I would hold against them.
  - emsy 11y ago
    And the fact that they recall 10 year old, out of warranty iPods and replace them with new ones because of battery issues https://www.apple.com/support/ipodnano_replacement/ https://www.apple.com/support/ipodnano_replacement/ My dad still uses my old 4S without a problem while he had constant issues with my old HTC phone
  - WA 11y ago
    iOS7 made the iPhone 4 so slow, it was unusable.
    - wingerlang 11y ago
      While it is noticeable, I use and iPhone 4 with 7 on it as my daily device. I definitely don't think it is unusable. Maybe my pain tolerance it high though.
    - castell 11y ago
      iOS7 made iPad2 and iPadMini very slow too.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      I remember buying a 4th gen iPod Touch, and it was incredibly slow and buggy the day I bought it-it really needed at least 512 MB RAM, like its equivalent released iPhone 4, instead of relying on older specs to run the same operating system.
    - wil421 11y ago
      Unusable? I had to use a 3GS for 5 months last year while I was waiting for my contract to expire. The phone is going on 7 years and still works with no issues although it is slow. Compared to a couple Androids that had problems after 6 months and have little to no updates.
  - legulere 11y ago
    It's good that apple products are sturdy and get updates longer than other devices. There are still some issues though: There are some hindrances to repairing: Glued in batteries, soldered on RAM, soldered on/proprietary connector SSDs. This also means that apple devices can't be upgraded (not really a problem with storage on the mac, as you can use external hard drives, but on iOS devices it's a problem. Upgradable ram would definetly prolong the lifetime of a device). Even when Apple does those repairs, they're way more expensive because of those things. Another way how Apple pushes planned obsolescence is by not giving certain features to older devices. Adblocking and the new colour temperature setting for instance are only available on 64 bit devices while older devices would be perfectly capable to also have them.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago
  Apple doesn't do this imo. I remember when I used Windows I had to upgrade way more often or reinstall the OS just to speed it up every 12 months. My Macs last 4-6 years and I know people happy with iPhone's that are 4 years old. I stil use a 7 year old iPod with no issues too.
  - smcl 11y ago
    Has there ever been any in-depth analysis on the cause of this slowness in windows-based computers over time? I got my work laptop around the same time as my Macbook Air - 4 years ago. While the MBA is still lovely (only flaw is that the battery lasts only ~4 hours) and the Windows laptop is truly awful, takes forever to boot and chugs along on simple tasks. I cannot think of what could be causing this, there was very little difference in their performance when I first got them.
    - Infinitesimus 11y ago
      ssd vs hdd perhaps?
      - smcl 11y ago
        That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know
        davnicwil 11y ago
        For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.
greggman 11y ago
Does this mean iOS 10 will have a system wide ad blocker and all apps will be required to allow their ads be blocked? Or, will there still be this split where if you want unrestricted ads you need to make a native app instead of a web page/web app which coincidentally helps lock-in and potential makes Apple money if the app charges for anything
- millstone 11y ago
  iAds have never been "unrestricted." In fact the restrictions are quite strong, both on the content of the advertisement and any data collection [1]. If web ads had followed these guidelines, maybe content blockers would not be so compelling. [1] PDF: https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-guidelines/iAd_Content_Guidelines.pdf https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-guidelines/iAd_Conte...
  - golergka 11y ago
    Don't let facts get in the way of anti-ad and anti-tracking hysteria.
  - makomk 11y ago
    Their only restriction on data collection is that you have to ask them for permission first, and I suspect that's going away after this announcement that Apple are no longer directly involved in approving iAd campaigns. Meanwhile, iAd uses a whole bunch of tracking data including GPS for ad targeting, some of which Apple forbid competing mobile advertising networks from making use of. Also, I notice they forbid 'messaging that identifies the particular target for the campaign—for example, “Single men, 18–24, who live in Washington State, click here!”.' Presumably because if customers knew just how much Apple were helping advertisers target them, it'd spoil their whole we're-better-than-Google line.
twsted 11y ago
Very good thing. It was an annoying conflict of interest.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
amelius 11y ago
What will this mean for ad-blocking in Safari?
- LeoPanthera 11y ago
  Absolutely nothing
- rsynnott 11y ago
  Given than iAd never did web ads anyway, probably not a lot.
bitmapbrother 11y ago
I wonder how Apple will spin this. Are they going to say they stepped away from iAds because it was a conflict of interest with the "moral contract" they had with their users or are they going to admit the truth and say it was a financial failure.
- plg 11y ago
  either way I'm happy about it
- wklauss 11y ago
  They will probably say nothing. Not a significant business for the company and the iAd program continues, just changes the approach because they didn't have any traction.
- Bud 11y ago
  They've already admitted, "It's just not what we're good at."
  - bitmapbrother 11y ago
    Which leads me to the question what would have happened if iAds was a financial success? Would Apple still have abandoned it or would they still be two faced and preach to the press and public, at every opportunity they get, that they're pro-user, but conveniently leave out the fact that they sell advertisers access to their users profile.
mcosta 11y ago
buzzfeed really? since when this has been a trusted source?
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  Since they hired Ben Smith from Politico. Buzzfeed started with fluff and then grew a news operation. Most newspapers are now having to grow their fluff operations in order to attract enough traffic to survive (see: WashingtonPost.com).
jonknee 11y ago
Steps back? When had they stepped up? iAd was a flop from day one.
chejazi 11y ago
I imagine Apple provided a superior experience since they manage the App development frameworks on Mac / iOS. The flop must have been inventory. A lot of advertisers are now turning to exchanges (DoubleClick, AppNexus, OpenX...) for inventory whereas Apple forced you to use iAd Workbench [0]. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924 EDIT: The flop must have been demand, not inventory.
- seanp2k2 11y ago
  I understand what you mean, but reading "demand [for ads]" in my head made me laugh.

86 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Apparently it doesn't mean less ads. Apple is just outsourcing.

Now let's hope that this means Apple will no longer have a conflict of interest when it comes to selling eyeballs or user data.

givinguflac 11y ago
Do you have an example of Apple "selling user data" ? Because I don't think you do.
- micheljansen 11y ago
  Nope, Apple has actually taken a pretty strong stance against such practices, but being in the ad business meant there has been pressure on Apple to do just that (after all, more personalised ads perform better, and Apple has all the means to provide advertisers the data they need to offer them). Now that they have left the advertising business, that pressure is hopefully also gone.

tdkl 11y ago

Planned obsolescence is way more profitable anyway.

mamon 11y ago
I don't know what do you mean by "planned obsolescence" in context of Apple products. I constantly see people using few years old iPhone 4S or 7 years old MacBooks. If by "obscolescence" you mean the fact that they release new and better product every year then that's nothing that I would hold against them.
- emsy 11y ago
  And the fact that they recall 10 year old, out of warranty iPods and replace them with new ones because of battery issues https://www.apple.com/support/ipodnano_replacement/ https://www.apple.com/support/ipodnano_replacement/ My dad still uses my old 4S without a problem while he had constant issues with my old HTC phone
- WA 11y ago
  iOS7 made the iPhone 4 so slow, it was unusable.
  - wingerlang 11y ago
    While it is noticeable, I use and iPhone 4 with 7 on it as my daily device. I definitely don't think it is unusable. Maybe my pain tolerance it high though.
  - castell 11y ago
    iOS7 made iPad2 and iPadMini very slow too.
  - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
    I remember buying a 4th gen iPod Touch, and it was incredibly slow and buggy the day I bought it-it really needed at least 512 MB RAM, like its equivalent released iPhone 4, instead of relying on older specs to run the same operating system.
  - wil421 11y ago
    Unusable? I had to use a 3GS for 5 months last year while I was waiting for my contract to expire. The phone is going on 7 years and still works with no issues although it is slow. Compared to a couple Androids that had problems after 6 months and have little to no updates.
- legulere 11y ago
  It's good that apple products are sturdy and get updates longer than other devices. There are still some issues though: There are some hindrances to repairing: Glued in batteries, soldered on RAM, soldered on/proprietary connector SSDs. This also means that apple devices can't be upgraded (not really a problem with storage on the mac, as you can use external hard drives, but on iOS devices it's a problem. Upgradable ram would definetly prolong the lifetime of a device). Even when Apple does those repairs, they're way more expensive because of those things. Another way how Apple pushes planned obsolescence is by not giving certain features to older devices. Adblocking and the new colour temperature setting for instance are only available on 64 bit devices while older devices would be perfectly capable to also have them.
k-mcgrady 11y ago
Apple doesn't do this imo. I remember when I used Windows I had to upgrade way more often or reinstall the OS just to speed it up every 12 months. My Macs last 4-6 years and I know people happy with iPhone's that are 4 years old. I stil use a 7 year old iPod with no issues too.
- smcl 11y ago
  Has there ever been any in-depth analysis on the cause of this slowness in windows-based computers over time? I got my work laptop around the same time as my Macbook Air - 4 years ago. While the MBA is still lovely (only flaw is that the battery lasts only ~4 hours) and the Windows laptop is truly awful, takes forever to boot and chugs along on simple tasks. I cannot think of what could be causing this, there was very little difference in their performance when I first got them.
  - Infinitesimus 11y ago
    ssd vs hdd perhaps?
    - smcl 11y ago
      That would explain an immediate difference in performance, but would an HDD degrade? Genuine question, as I do not know
      - davnicwil 11y ago
        For all practical purposes, no the parts of an HDD do not degrade physically in a way which causes performance to reduce noticeably on a continuous scale over time. The parts very definitely do degrade physically of course, but the effect on performance for practical purposes will be rather more binary, i.e. one day it just won't work any more ;-) What does cause the performance of the spinning disk to degrade noticeably over time is fragmentation of data. Especially in laptops, the increase of fragmentation and the correlated decrease in the performance of basically everything can be easily identified by the increased clicking and whirring noises coming from the disk (you may have noticed this on yours) - this is the heads thrashing around trying to read all that fragmented data spread around all over the disk. Especially on older laptops, if the HDD has never been de-fragmented, it's almost certain that this is your problem and is the performance bottleneck which has been getting tighter over time. In that sense yes, HDDs do degrade over time, but not in an irreversible manner, until of course they physically crash due to parts failure. Funnily enough SSDs are not affected by data fragmentation, because the speed with which the data is accessed is not affected by its physical location in nearly the same way (distances over the disk which are massive to motor-driver heads are irrelevant to electrons), but they do degrade physically with writes in a way which degrades performance continuously over time. The difference is though, you'd very likely never notice this on a home laptop with an SSD unless it was extremely old, generally with modern SSDs you'd have to be doing data-centre server levels of daily reads/writes to start to really worry about wearing the thing out in any noticeable way, over any sensible time period.

greggman 11y ago

Does this mean iOS 10 will have a system wide ad blocker and all apps will be required to allow their ads be blocked? Or, will there still be this split where if you want unrestricted ads you need to make a native app instead of a web page/web app which coincidentally helps lock-in and potential makes Apple money if the app charges for anything

millstone 11y ago
iAds have never been "unrestricted." In fact the restrictions are quite strong, both on the content of the advertisement and any data collection [1]. If web ads had followed these guidelines, maybe content blockers would not be so compelling. [1] PDF: https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-guidelines/iAd_Content_Guidelines.pdf https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-guidelines/iAd_Conte...
- golergka 11y ago
  Don't let facts get in the way of anti-ad and anti-tracking hysteria.
- makomk 11y ago
  Their only restriction on data collection is that you have to ask them for permission first, and I suspect that's going away after this announcement that Apple are no longer directly involved in approving iAd campaigns. Meanwhile, iAd uses a whole bunch of tracking data including GPS for ad targeting, some of which Apple forbid competing mobile advertising networks from making use of. Also, I notice they forbid 'messaging that identifies the particular target for the campaign—for example, “Single men, 18–24, who live in Washington State, click here!”.' Presumably because if customers knew just how much Apple were helping advertisers target them, it'd spoil their whole we're-better-than-Google line.

twsted 11y ago

Very good thing. It was an annoying conflict of interest.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

amelius 11y ago

What will this mean for ad-blocking in Safari?

LeoPanthera 11y ago
Absolutely nothing
rsynnott 11y ago
Given than iAd never did web ads anyway, probably not a lot.

bitmapbrother 11y ago

I wonder how Apple will spin this. Are they going to say they stepped away from iAds because it was a conflict of interest with the "moral contract" they had with their users or are they going to admit the truth and say it was a financial failure.

plg 11y ago
either way I'm happy about it
wklauss 11y ago
They will probably say nothing. Not a significant business for the company and the iAd program continues, just changes the approach because they didn't have any traction.
Bud 11y ago
They've already admitted, "It's just not what we're good at."
- bitmapbrother 11y ago
  Which leads me to the question what would have happened if iAds was a financial success? Would Apple still have abandoned it or would they still be two faced and preach to the press and public, at every opportunity they get, that they're pro-user, but conveniently leave out the fact that they sell advertisers access to their users profile.

mcosta 11y ago

buzzfeed really? since when this has been a trusted source?

snowwrestler 11y ago
Since they hired Ben Smith from Politico. Buzzfeed started with fluff and then grew a news operation. Most newspapers are now having to grow their fluff operations in order to attract enough traffic to survive (see: WashingtonPost.com).

jonknee 11y ago

Steps back? When had they stepped up? iAd was a flop from day one.

chejazi 11y ago

I imagine Apple provided a superior experience since they manage the App development frameworks on Mac / iOS. The flop must have been inventory. A lot of advertisers are now turning to exchanges (DoubleClick, AppNexus, OpenX...) for inventory whereas Apple forced you to use iAd Workbench [0]. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924 EDIT: The flop must have been demand, not inventory.

seanp2k2 11y ago
I understand what you mean, but reading "demand [for ads]" in my head made me laugh.