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I would expect Apple to adopt the same business model they use elsewhere. Lower volume, higher price. I doubt they want to compete head-to-head with AdMob selli

by jsz0 17y ago

I would expect Apple to adopt the same business model they use elsewhere. Lower volume, higher price. I doubt they want to compete head-to-head with AdMob selling low value ads to diet pill web sites and punch the monkey scams. More likely they'll have a short list of exclusive deals for mobile advertising mostly with Fortune 500 companies. Apple could have had AdMob if they wanted them. I get the feeling they were never fully committed to the idea of becoming a dumb ad aggregator and that's ultimately why they passed on AdMob. If we want to get really cynical maybe Apple never had any interest in AdMob. They simply wanted to provoke Google into making what looks like an anti-competitive acquisition. They know Google, like Microsoft, has the war chest to buy first and think later. Did Google really need AdMob? It seems to me Google could have murdered AdMob in-house with the leverage they already have with AdSense/AdWords. Maybe Apple's plan from the start was to go the premium route and just wanted to distract Google with what appeared to be a more direct threat.

mattparcher 17y ago
I'm not so sure that Apple was baiting Google into legal trouble. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even said that iAd would help push the AdMob deal through, being "evidence of a highly competitive market." http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 My impression was that Apple simply wanted to keep AdMob's mountain of analytics data away from Google, given AdMob's majority share of the in-app iPhone ad market. I doubt even Apple has as much usage statistics as AdMob. This idea would appear to be borne out by recent changes to Apple's iPhone developer terms of service agreement, which seem to limit or even outright ban the sharing of usage data by developers to third parties: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 Of course, Apple did end up buying one of AdMob's lowlier competitors, Quattro. It seems they gave up on keeping user data out of Google's hands, and are now working to raise the standard of advertising on the iPhone while being able to collect a bit of that data themselves.

by jsz0 17y ago

mattparcher 17y ago

I'm not so sure that Apple was baiting Google into legal trouble. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even said that iAd would help push the AdMob deal through, being "evidence of a highly competitive market." http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B0F820100412 My impression was that Apple simply wanted to keep AdMob's mountain of analytics data away from Google, given AdMob's majority share of the in-app iPhone ad market. I doubt even Apple has as much usage statistics as AdMob. This idea would appear to be borne out by recent changes to Apple's iPhone developer terms of service agreement, which seem to limit or even outright ban the sharing of usage data by developers to third parties: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1253810 Of course, Apple did end up buying one of AdMob's lowlier competitors, Quattro. It seems they gave up on keeping user data out of Google's hands, and are now working to raise the standard of advertising on the iPhone while being able to collect a bit of that data themselves.