7 ms·

iAd is the ultimate FU to Google. The cheap way to pay them back for Android would have been to banish Google from the iPhone. Instead, they're attempting to t

by gamble 17y ago

iAd is the ultimate FU to Google. The cheap way to pay them back for Android would have been to banish Google from the iPhone. Instead, they're attempting to transform mobile advertising into something where Google's technical strengths are worthless, while their weaknesses - user interfaces, platform fragmentation, and apps - are a serious liability. Worse, Apple is right - mobile ads do suck. Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld. This is an 'aha' moment akin to when Google launched adwords. If iAd is easy to develop for and deployed across millions of devices, Google's ambitions for mobile are in serious trouble.

tortilla 17y ago
Exactly. This is a fucking big deal :)
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  Being a Facebook developer I've pretty much ignored the iPhone up until now because of the distribution problems. This makes it tempting.
mattmaroon 17y ago
Well, launching a web browser from an app is a lot less disruptive when you have multitasking. This will be big because game makers will buy these by the boatload. I'll go on record right now predicting game ads will be over 80% of what you see on these.
- metachor 17y ago
  If game makers take up this approach in force, that will be a fair sight better than the status quo of supporting "free" games by way of in-app purchases (that are essentially mandatory to get the full experience of the game).
  - mattmaroon 17y ago
    I know some game makers, and I'm pretty sure none of them like the current paradigm much either. It's a pain in the ass. Because of the horrendous distribution system, to succeed on the iPhone you have to be constantly gaming the app store, and every hour you spend doing that is an hour you didn't spend making your game better. This is why we've never touched it. On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. We don't have to constantly release new versions and incentivize users to download them just to get ourselves back in the top 20. There are some tricks, of course, but they're less of a detour from the desired path, if that makes sense. iAds will make success on the platform a numbers game. Every free app will run it because it can't pay worse than the current options, even with the 40% rake. Paid apps will break out the spreadsheet and almost certainly find a CPA below the app's price for a paid one. My totally off-the-cuff guess is that with a really engaging iAd you'll end up paying $1 to sell a $2 app, at which point it's all about volume. Selling a million like that might be doable, and now we're talking money in line with what Facebook apps can make. Still, the problem will be that the most successful iPhone apps make about the same amount lifetime that the most successful Facebook apps make in a month. But the odds of succeeding may now be high enough to make it a worthwhile play.
    - gojomo 17y ago
      On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. Maybe the App Store needs iAd/GameKit integration of a 'like'/'recommend'-to-friends feature.
      - mattmaroon 17y ago
        The only issue might be privacy. Your phone book is full of people, 90+% of whom probably do not have an iPhone. On Facebook, every one of your Facebook contacts has clearly already divulged to you that they are on Facebook. Still, I imagine if Apple made an opt-out method of automatically friending all of your email contacts who have iPhones (or at least an opt-out method of seeing them) it would be popular.
      - swernli 17y ago
- gojomo 17y ago
  Mobile ads probably need 'bookmark for later' as a primary option, as in: I'm in the middle of something else right now, but that's interesting enough to review when I have time.
tomerico 17y ago
I thought the opposite, now Google will have easier time in its anti trust issues, because they can claim they are not a monopoly.
timr 17y ago
They're certainly picking a fight. It's far from clear that they'll win. If the iPhone loses its dominance in smart phones, this move will have done nothing but antagonize the most obvious heir to the throne. Like nearly everything else Apple does, iAds will have a monopoly on a small market. Meanwhile, much of the iPhone's greatness depends on Google's own products....
- tptacek 17y ago
  What, search and maps?
  - irq11 17y ago
    Of course! Everyone assumes that Bing is just a drop-in replacement for Google, but it doesn't come without costs: Google has a massive brand identity. The phone with Google search has an implicit advantage over the phone with "Bing".
    - glhaynes 17y ago
      It's not like Google's gonna block iPhones from Google search.
    - tptacek 17y ago
      Google is the default search engine of most Microsoft users. There's no way the iPhone is going to lose Google search. Meanwhile, search is simply not a huge part of my iPhone experience. Maps is actually a bigger deal to me --- but maps is also easier to replace.
      - CapitalistCartr 17y ago
        Google is spending upwards of a billion US dollars to make Street View, in the process creating a top-notch street map of the World. And now they provide that data free, I doubt Google maps is so easily replaced, even with Bing Maps.
      - cmelbye 17y ago
tvon 17y ago
Interesting Steve quote from Q&A: We don’t know much about the advertising stuff. We’re learning. We tried to buy a company called AdMob, the biggest mobile advertising company. But Google came in and snatched them from us. They didn’t want us to have them. So we bought another smaller company, Quattro Wireless. They are teaching us. But we are babes in the woods. We are learning as fast as we can. edit: Mostly referring to the 'babe in the woods' comment, along with his perspective on the AdMob purchase.
- kristofferR 17y ago
  http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/14/apple_met_with_admob_weeks_before_acquisition_by_google.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/14/apple_met_with... http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/apple-acquires-quattro-wireless/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/apple-acquires-quattro-wire...
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- ugh 17y ago
  For all the propaganda you sometimes get from Apple it’s really astonishing how openly Jobs sometimes says stuff like that. I like it. Not something many CEOs would say on the day they announce their entrance into the ad business.
  - Perceval 17y ago
    IIRC, Jobs made a similar statement about being a novice when introducing the first Xserves, acknowledging that this was not an area in which Apple historically had strength, but that this was a first offering.
    - gbookman 17y ago
      He also made a similar statement with the release of iTunes 1.0 back in '01, as Apple took far longer to embrace digital music than other companies.
bdotdub 17y ago
While its true mobile ads suck, its not like others couldn't have done advertisements that are just as interactive as the ones Steve demoed. I'm feel like a large reason why they haven't become popular is because advertising companies don't have the know how to do this sort of thing. That said, iAds will be successful just because its Apples advertising platform and very high profile.
- gamble 17y ago
  The beauty of iAds is that it plays to Apple's strengths. In particular, they're the one handset manufacturer that has a unified platform large enough to support an advertising platform and an OS capable of rich interactive ads. Google could have built iAd years ago, but it isn't in their DNA and the fragmentary nature of Android might make it difficult to deploy.
- wvenable 17y ago
  Perhaps iAds will work because of Apple's well known approval process. It's one thing to create interactive ads, it another to keep the quality high enough in general that people bother to click them.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    If I were Apple, I'd let users vote ads up or down. Not only would this improve the ads and UX, the data would be a goldmine!
    - wvenable 17y ago
      They can probably track how long you "interact" with the ad. That's probably much better data than providing up/down votes.
FluidDjango 17y ago
Interesting comment by Jobs (disingenuous ?), that "we don't know much about advertising; we're babes in the woods."
- gamble 17y ago
  Wolf cubs, maybe. =)
yanw 17y ago
So what prevents Google from serving similar Admob ads? from Gizmodo live coverage: Q: And can people use stuff other than iAd and Game Center? Steve: Yes, you can use any service.
- gamble 17y ago
  Nothing. But likewise, Google's core competence in search doesn't help them at all, while iAd will be baked into the development kit, App Store, and millions of devices.
  - yanw 17y ago
    true but Admod is cross platform, and if Google offers a better deal that could also provide an incentive. It's not automatically game-over because the magical Steve Jobs thinks he invented advertising
    - gamble 17y ago
      Sure - just like the iPad isn't going to kill off the Kindle overnight. Still, when a competitor can put out a product that halves your market share in its first week on the market, you sit up and take notice. Everything Google's done in the last few years has seemed bent on extending their search ads monopoly to mobile devices. If success was counted based on devices shipped, Android was doing pretty well. iAd is a serious setback if it turns out to be more profitable than mobile browser ads.
      - yanw 17y ago
        Again what prevent Google from offering those types of interactive ads on webapps with HTML5 and js? you can still get creative with ads, and no one halved anyones market today.
- niravs 17y ago
  This was detailed in the presentation. Using Google's Admob ads presumably will not be as seamless of an experience for the app developer. It'll be harder to implement things like keeping the user in the app while viewing the ad or adding video/photos. What if using Apple's ad network is few lines of code? No library to import, or have a 3rd party dependency on your app.
gyardley 17y ago
"Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld." Most mobile ad networks doing in-app advertising switched to a web view within the application months ago. In addtion, clickthrough rates are generally pretty high - although I blame 'butterfingers' for a lot of this. (Tracking post-click conversions is hard to do on the iPhone platform but when we've done it I haven't been horribly impressed.)

by gamble 17y ago

tortilla 17y ago

Exactly. This is a fucking big deal :)

mattmaroon 17y ago
Being a Facebook developer I've pretty much ignored the iPhone up until now because of the distribution problems. This makes it tempting.

mattmaroon 17y ago

Well, launching a web browser from an app is a lot less disruptive when you have multitasking. This will be big because game makers will buy these by the boatload. I'll go on record right now predicting game ads will be over 80% of what you see on these.

metachor 17y ago
If game makers take up this approach in force, that will be a fair sight better than the status quo of supporting "free" games by way of in-app purchases (that are essentially mandatory to get the full experience of the game).
- mattmaroon 17y ago
  I know some game makers, and I'm pretty sure none of them like the current paradigm much either. It's a pain in the ass. Because of the horrendous distribution system, to succeed on the iPhone you have to be constantly gaming the app store, and every hour you spend doing that is an hour you didn't spend making your game better. This is why we've never touched it. On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. We don't have to constantly release new versions and incentivize users to download them just to get ourselves back in the top 20. There are some tricks, of course, but they're less of a detour from the desired path, if that makes sense. iAds will make success on the platform a numbers game. Every free app will run it because it can't pay worse than the current options, even with the 40% rake. Paid apps will break out the spreadsheet and almost certainly find a CPA below the app's price for a paid one. My totally off-the-cuff guess is that with a really engaging iAd you'll end up paying $1 to sell a $2 app, at which point it's all about volume. Selling a million like that might be doable, and now we're talking money in line with what Facebook apps can make. Still, the problem will be that the most successful iPhone apps make about the same amount lifetime that the most successful Facebook apps make in a month. But the odds of succeeding may now be high enough to make it a worthwhile play.
  - gojomo 17y ago
    On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. Maybe the App Store needs iAd/GameKit integration of a 'like'/'recommend'-to-friends feature.
    - mattmaroon 17y ago
      The only issue might be privacy. Your phone book is full of people, 90+% of whom probably do not have an iPhone. On Facebook, every one of your Facebook contacts has clearly already divulged to you that they are on Facebook. Still, I imagine if Apple made an opt-out method of automatically friending all of your email contacts who have iPhones (or at least an opt-out method of seeing them) it would be popular.
    - swernli 17y ago
gojomo 17y ago
Mobile ads probably need 'bookmark for later' as a primary option, as in: I'm in the middle of something else right now, but that's interesting enough to review when I have time.

tomerico 17y ago

I thought the opposite, now Google will have easier time in its anti trust issues, because they can claim they are not a monopoly.

timr 17y ago

They're certainly picking a fight. It's far from clear that they'll win. If the iPhone loses its dominance in smart phones, this move will have done nothing but antagonize the most obvious heir to the throne. Like nearly everything else Apple does, iAds will have a monopoly on a small market. Meanwhile, much of the iPhone's greatness depends on Google's own products....

tptacek 17y ago
What, search and maps?
- irq11 17y ago
  Of course! Everyone assumes that Bing is just a drop-in replacement for Google, but it doesn't come without costs: Google has a massive brand identity. The phone with Google search has an implicit advantage over the phone with "Bing".
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    It's not like Google's gonna block iPhones from Google search.
  - tptacek 17y ago
    Google is the default search engine of most Microsoft users. There's no way the iPhone is going to lose Google search. Meanwhile, search is simply not a huge part of my iPhone experience. Maps is actually a bigger deal to me --- but maps is also easier to replace.
    - CapitalistCartr 17y ago
      Google is spending upwards of a billion US dollars to make Street View, in the process creating a top-notch street map of the World. And now they provide that data free, I doubt Google maps is so easily replaced, even with Bing Maps.
    - cmelbye 17y ago

tvon 17y ago

Interesting Steve quote from Q&A: We don’t know much about the advertising stuff. We’re learning. We tried to buy a company called AdMob, the biggest mobile advertising company. But Google came in and snatched them from us. They didn’t want us to have them. So we bought another smaller company, Quattro Wireless. They are teaching us. But we are babes in the woods. We are learning as fast as we can. edit: Mostly referring to the 'babe in the woods' comment, along with his perspective on the AdMob purchase.

kristofferR 17y ago
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/14/apple_met_with_admob_weeks_before_acquisition_by_google.html http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/14/apple_met_with... http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/apple-acquires-quattro-wireless/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/apple-acquires-quattro-wire...
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
ugh 17y ago
For all the propaganda you sometimes get from Apple it’s really astonishing how openly Jobs sometimes says stuff like that. I like it. Not something many CEOs would say on the day they announce their entrance into the ad business.
- Perceval 17y ago
  IIRC, Jobs made a similar statement about being a novice when introducing the first Xserves, acknowledging that this was not an area in which Apple historically had strength, but that this was a first offering.
  - gbookman 17y ago
    He also made a similar statement with the release of iTunes 1.0 back in '01, as Apple took far longer to embrace digital music than other companies.

bdotdub 17y ago

While its true mobile ads suck, its not like others couldn't have done advertisements that are just as interactive as the ones Steve demoed. I'm feel like a large reason why they haven't become popular is because advertising companies don't have the know how to do this sort of thing. That said, iAds will be successful just because its Apples advertising platform and very high profile.

gamble 17y ago
The beauty of iAds is that it plays to Apple's strengths. In particular, they're the one handset manufacturer that has a unified platform large enough to support an advertising platform and an OS capable of rich interactive ads. Google could have built iAd years ago, but it isn't in their DNA and the fragmentary nature of Android might make it difficult to deploy.
wvenable 17y ago
Perhaps iAds will work because of Apple's well known approval process. It's one thing to create interactive ads, it another to keep the quality high enough in general that people bother to click them.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  If I were Apple, I'd let users vote ads up or down. Not only would this improve the ads and UX, the data would be a goldmine!
  - wvenable 17y ago
    They can probably track how long you "interact" with the ad. That's probably much better data than providing up/down votes.

FluidDjango 17y ago

Interesting comment by Jobs (disingenuous ?), that "we don't know much about advertising; we're babes in the woods."

gamble 17y ago
Wolf cubs, maybe. =)

yanw 17y ago

So what prevents Google from serving similar Admob ads? from Gizmodo live coverage: Q: And can people use stuff other than iAd and Game Center? Steve: Yes, you can use any service.

gamble 17y ago
Nothing. But likewise, Google's core competence in search doesn't help them at all, while iAd will be baked into the development kit, App Store, and millions of devices.
- yanw 17y ago
  true but Admod is cross platform, and if Google offers a better deal that could also provide an incentive. It's not automatically game-over because the magical Steve Jobs thinks he invented advertising
  - gamble 17y ago
    Sure - just like the iPad isn't going to kill off the Kindle overnight. Still, when a competitor can put out a product that halves your market share in its first week on the market, you sit up and take notice. Everything Google's done in the last few years has seemed bent on extending their search ads monopoly to mobile devices. If success was counted based on devices shipped, Android was doing pretty well. iAd is a serious setback if it turns out to be more profitable than mobile browser ads.
    - yanw 17y ago
      Again what prevent Google from offering those types of interactive ads on webapps with HTML5 and js? you can still get creative with ads, and no one halved anyones market today.
niravs 17y ago
This was detailed in the presentation. Using Google's Admob ads presumably will not be as seamless of an experience for the app developer. It'll be harder to implement things like keeping the user in the app while viewing the ad or adding video/photos. What if using Apple's ad network is few lines of code? No library to import, or have a 3rd party dependency on your app.

gyardley 17y ago

"Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld." Most mobile ad networks doing in-app advertising switched to a web view within the application months ago. In addtion, clickthrough rates are generally pretty high - although I blame 'butterfingers' for a lot of this. (Tracking post-click conversions is hard to do on the iPhone platform but when we've done it I haven't been horribly impressed.)