Nearly six years after launching iAd, a report says that Apple has chosen to get away from its advertising platform.
Sources speaking to BuzzFeed News say that Apple is ending its direct involvement with iAd, including eliminating the sales team. “It’s just not something we’re good at,” said one of the sources of the report. Now that ad publishers will no longer have to work with Apple on creating and selling iAds, the publishers will be 100 percent on the hook for that work, but they’ll also get 100 percent of the revenue.
The original goal of the iAd platform was to make advertisements that felt like they belonged on iOS. Apple wanted to make ads that, when tapped, would become full-screen and interactive. Whenever the user was done with the ad, they could click the “X” to leave it and be sent right back to the ad that they were previously in.
Apple declined to comment on today’s report, so there’s no official explanation as to why the company may be largely backing away from iAd. However, reports suggest that Apple’s iAd service was responsible for around 5 percent of mobile display ad revenue in 2015, while Google had 9 percent and Facebook had 38. So while Apple set out to make a better ad system for iOS users, it seems that the competition from the likes of Google and Facebook was a bit too much for Apple to continue investing so much in iAd. Under the new system, Apple will let publishers do all of the work of creating and selling iAds and keeping the platform going.
