Apple's sleeping advertising business

Apple's sleeping advertising business(thespl.it)

71 points by azizsaya 3 years ago | 74 comments

Apple adding ads to the AppStore was a terrible idea. Not because I hate seeing ads, but as a developer I hate it.

I’ve made some apps that have had millions of downloads that I launched with no ad spend whatsoever, just good old fashioned viral growth. It got a tonne of copycats but that was OK because I just made the app better in response.

Now, your app is competing against all the inevitable copycats - but those copycats can now just outspend you on ads. They no longer have to make a better product, just have a bigger budget. People are lazy and download the first result a lot of the time.

AppStore search is famously awful enough as it is, ads make it even worse.

musicale 3 years ago | |

It's also a lousy user experience since the bogus ad app shows up at the top of the page and eats up screen space, especially on a phone.

> People are lazy and download the first result a lot of the time.

If people need something right away, they're unlikely to want to spend time evaluating a bunch of alternatives.

jackjeff 3 years ago | | |

It’s just made the App Store unusable. Even exact name search is fraught with peril.

I just Google things instead now.

I feel like this is what is going to happen for every product Apple will infest with ads.

olliej 3 years ago | |

It’s so obnoxious - rather than fixing search or discovery they made a “buy the first few hits” service

hnbear 3 years ago |

That Apple could do it doesn’t mean they will, and the article doesn’t present much actual evidence it will.

In Apple long-running saga with Ads it’s always seemed like Apple hates ads because it’s other companies content (and so priorities, aesthetic, and feel) jammed inside an Apple product. And Apple hates anything that ruins the Apple Experience :tm:

Paying to be the first App Store entry is great, because it’s Apple showing off the normal Apple content (an app card) within a search list of app cards.

But in an app that cuts to some cheap, ugly, non-Apple aesthetic ad - that’s pretty unappealing and ruins the Apple Experience.

It’s tougher to craft that Apple type experience while also selling out.

I think they’re also aware of the implicit value to their business of being the non-Ad driven eco-system. It’s all part of being premium. Selling to the users who also pay for Netflix premium, Hulu ad-free, etc. It’s built into their business model.

In some ways it’s been like that for years - PC laptops come coated in ads from the Intel Inside stickers and pre-installed crapwear, to the design and logos on the product boxes themselves.

I’m reminded of this: https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k

I think Apple sorta, maybe wants Ads because it’s so lucrative, but also recognizes those challenges are real, and tough, and destroy their brand quickly.

tpush 3 years ago | |

Counterpoint: The Apple News app. Even of you're a paying($10!) subscriber, the app is full of absolutely awful advertisement.

The current culture of Apple produced this app; it wouldn't surprise me if other properties of Apple start to embed ads.

smogcutter 3 years ago | | |

Having once worked at a publisher (although in IT not ad sales or product, so call it “adjacent” rather than inside baseball), I’m certain this is about negotiating with publishers rather than apple’s own priorities.

A platform like Apple News does very little to redirect traffic back to the home page where you show the big 1st party ads that actually bankroll the org. Users stay in the app. From a publishers pov it’s really unattractive unless you can show ads.

hnbear 3 years ago | | |

Interesting, thank you. News is one of the apps I never use, sticking to NetNewsWire+Feedly.

I'd hope that ends up in the category of "tried it, failed, phase it out/down", but maybe not.

I especially hate ads in paid-for subscriptions.

tehnub 3 years ago | | |

Yeah, for some reason the ads in Apple News are particularly awful. I do have ad personalization turned off, but that doesn’t explain seeing the same large, irrelevant, and strange ad plastered between every two or three paragraphs.

lern_too_spel 3 years ago | | |

The real reason Apple doesn't like ads is that ads mean somebody else gets revenue and Apple does not (because apps with ads are free, bypassing App Store revenue share). Now that Apple has invested sufficiently into building a competent ad platform, this will change as quickly as they can ramp it up.

tinus_hn 3 years ago | | |

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the news partners are requiring them to include ads.

Apocryphon 3 years ago | |

There are embedded ads in Xcode now:

https://twitter.com/niw/status/1577955010167508992

Now granted, it’s to upsell a service that’s integrated with the product you’re using, but it goes to show Apple products no longer simply sell themselves without intrusive ads.

Gigachad 3 years ago | | |

I always immediately dismiss these headlines because people lump feature highlights in the same category as 3rd party banner ads.

It reminds me of the /g/ trend of calling everything from crash reporting to automatic updates a botnet.

prvit 3 years ago | | |

> but it goes to show Apple products no longer simply sell themselves without intrusive ads.

Is that ad really more intrusive than all the TV ads Apple has run over the years?

jonas21 3 years ago | |

> Paying to be the first App Store entry is great, because it’s Apple showing off the normal Apple content (an app card) within a search list of app cards.

The most lucrative ad-supported site in the world (Google search) also shows normal-looking paid content at the top of a list of search results. Apple doesn't need to accept ugly banner ads to build an enormous ad business.

ipsum2 3 years ago | | |

It's so normal-looking, its hard to tell the difference between paid and regular content!

1vuio0pswjnm7 3 years ago | |

It appears the parent comment is engaged in the same activity as the OP author: speculation. No evidence is presented that Apple will not continue to engage in more advertising.

Here is some "evidence" that Apple will increase the amount of advertising. FWIW, MacRumors states that Gurman's predictions are usually accurate.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/10/22/apple-will-show-m...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/08/14/apple-plans-offer...

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/mark-gurman

Personally I found the patent applications Apple filed back in 2009/2010 claiming tactics for putting advertising into the operating system (one of which I believe is mentioned in the article) to be a signal that the company has no philosophical opposition to placing unavoidable advertising on people's personal computers. What other explanation is there for filing such applications. Perhaps they had plans to block others from using certain advertising tactics. Yeah, right.

"It's tougher to craft that Apple type experience while also selling out."

When I first purchased an Apple computer there were no "advertising services". Maybe different Apple customers have different definitions of the "Apple type experience". Who knows. Some might think Apple already "sold out" years ago. Today's Apple computers come with Apple's "advertising platform", and "advertising services" are part of the "Services" line item in Apple's quarterly and annual revenue reporting.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/320193/0000320193220...

2OEH8eoCRo0 3 years ago | |

They have a turnkey plan b for the next CEO or if they have a bad quarter or two. You better believe they'll use it if they need to show growth.

kornhole 3 years ago | |

In that calculation of how much non subtle ads they can push will be how much it will take to actually drive people to leave and rewire some deep circuitry. I know I am generalizing, but Apple users are quite captured and often unable to switch to anything without strong resolve and help.

codekansas 3 years ago |

I switched to an iPhone about six months ago and have been shocked by how user-hostile the experience is compared to my old Pixel, primarily because of their ecosystem lock-in. For example, the watch randomly logged me out of Strava and started pushing me towards their random fitness tracking app, and iMessage won't let me click to open addresses because I uninstalled Apple Maps. I suspect (maybe hope) their anticompetitive behavior will start to draw more public scrutiny if they double down on their ad business.

samatman 3 years ago | |

When I get sent Google Maps links in Messages, they open in Google Maps.

Conversely, Apple Maps links open in Apple Maps. Which won't happen if you've uninstalled that app.

Why isn't it a generic piece of data which can open in any map program? c'mon, you know why.

Wowfunhappy 3 years ago | | |

It's more pernicious than that. If someone sends you an address, iOS will turn it into an Apple Maps link. Apple Maps specifically.

Gigachad 3 years ago | |

Two random anecdotes of bugs doesn’t really say much. Do you really think the watchOS contains a dedicated feature to log you out of Strava randomly to sell another fitness app?

g42gregory 3 years ago |

Apple products command significant premium over their competitors and the reason people are paying this premium is the clean(er) computing environment. If they start injecting ads everywhere, it would negate the reason to pay the premium for Apple products.

killjoywashere 3 years ago | |

This. I work with a company that is incredibly enmeshed with a government. They essentially do the hard analytical work to figure out what markets of the future might look like. Every once in a while, the company works on something that's obviously going to make markets and someone thinks "Hey, why don't we just build these services inside the company? It would be so much easier." And then the seniors are like "Naw, that's ok, let the companies form. They'll figure it out." The issue is this company would risk its credibility with the government if they started acting on their own advice ahead of legislation. They're in a position where taking action on their own recommendations would make insider trading look benign by comparison.

I feel like Apple is in a similar situation with its platform: sure they could abuse it. But not if they're long term greedy.

ActorNightly 3 years ago | |

Not quite.

Apple products command a premium because of the Apple logo, and Apple creating the premium image through marketing.

From a functional perspective, some aspects are better, but many aspects are also worse.

tinus_hn 3 years ago | | |

The phones really are pretty much the same price as a similarly specced Samsung, and the computers are more expensive but also last longer.

i_like_apis 3 years ago |

This reads like a conspiracy theory. It's just pictures of products with overlays that say "what if there was an ad here??".

And the accusation that "WHATS REALLY GOING ON with strict privacy is they are STRATEGICALLY ELIMINATING THE COMPETITION!!1!" is even worse.

st3fan 3 years ago | |

These articles are written by the ad industry who are still pissed that Apple is the only vendor around with balls to actually speak up for customer's privacy and implement App Tracking Transparency.

thakoppno 3 years ago |

Anyone else experience a garden-path sentence phenomenon and expected an article about REM sleep ad placement?

nine_k 3 years ago | |

Has the Sleep Different™ hardware been unveiled yet?

etempleton 3 years ago |

A piece comes up on HN about Apple’s purported pending foray into capital A Advertising once a month.

I have no idea if they will ever do it. We live long enough I am sure we will see it, but as it stands it would remove the biggest product differentiation and advantage Apple has as a company:

Apple does not need advertising for revenue.

Google can’t say this; Samsung can’t say this; even Amazon and Microsoft can’t say this anymore. They all need it to balance their books.

If Apple goes down this road it ruins their differentiation. The thing no one, with any real size and therefore capacity, can touch. Apple would be crazy to eliminate it.

gigel82 3 years ago | |

They're pretty confident all their "loyal customers" will just immediately take everything they sell as fact and amplify it (I'm pretty sure when they launch their ad platform it will be "the most private ad platform in the world" and fanboys will lap it up).

We got a glimpse into their confidence in this regard when they were getting ready to launch the local scanner (CSAM supposedly was the first application, but it's pretty obvious they were just introducing a way for governments and other entities to scan local content on users' devices for whatever they'd consider "wrong" at some time); they were really taken aback by community outcry and really took the "you're holding it wrong" snarky commentary to the next level for a while.

AJRF 3 years ago |

The recent approach to advertising services and the moves they are making detailed in this article have me asking the question, what is the point in paying the Apple premium these days?

rrwo 3 years ago | |

You purchase a lifestyle signifier. It's the tech equivalent of wearing Gucci.

SxC97 3 years ago | | |

Let's not pretend that Apple is the only company that people buy from to signal an in-group status.

I believe people also buy old thinkpads, dumb phones, android phones, and use Linux (arch btw) to signal to fellow nerds on the internet that they are not sheep and are more tech literate than the average person.

doublepg23 3 years ago | | |

Until they kill the SE I think luxury goods comparisons are silly. It’s not like flagship Android devices are cheap either.

nicolashahn 3 years ago |

This was the reason for iOS handicapping app's ad tracking, not "privacy"

ddxv 3 years ago |

I work in mobile advertising, and Apple Search has become a behemoth that is hard for companies small and large to grapple with. I have sat in on meetings from small to large that go the same way:

We spend a lot on Apple Ads, it's ROI is terrible, but we think our ranking is helped by our Apple Ad spending. We probably can't cut that.

Do you want to try removing ASA spend for 2 weeks?

No, probably too dangerous.

jay_kyburz 3 years ago | |

It's very interesting that they can't measure the effects.

When they say "probably too dangerous" they are suggesting that they will lose ground that can't be recovered by taking the money they saved in the previous month and double down the next month?

pdpi 3 years ago |

This whole thing seems increasingly unlikely.

The moment Apple makes a serious play in the ad market, they open themselves up to a double barrel dose of antitrust litigation from Facebook and Google, they'll have the mother of all PR nightmares to deal with (Fb and Google campaigning hard on years of hypocrisy). Probably a fair few more problems I'm not seeing.

jay_kyburz 3 years ago | |

They don't have to make a big play, they just need to creep it up very slowly.

seydor 3 years ago |

> Apple's advertising business will layer on top of all Apple's existing products and have extremely high margins

Afaik increased competition reduces margins. And this only applies to the US (Apple is a minority everywhere else). Even if they think they got the 'premium' consumers locked, their reach is small for ad campaigns

jonas21 3 years ago | |

One point the article makes is that Apple's strategy around privacy allows it to eliminate competition for its ad business.

> Apple first spent years telling us how much it respects consumer privacy... In the name of consumer privacy, it was able to box out competitors from using its first party device data, giving itself exclusive access to better target ads

seydor 3 years ago | | |

... in its own devices

it would also be schizophrenic if apple didn't have to abide by the rules it proudly imposes on others

pxue 3 years ago |

Apple isn't stupid enough to go all out on ads. At the core, they're still a "premium" product company that sells $450 pair of headphones because it plays nice with their other $1000+ products.

All they need to do is release a new peripheral and it's a $10-15B per year business in 5 years.

poulsbohemian 3 years ago |

The biggest issue in advertising is local. Google seemed like it had this once upon a time, but they make it hard for small-time advertisers to use their tools and the ROI is very hard to quantify. Facebook is trash. It's like they hate both the public and their advertisers, and again, the ROI is very hard to quantify for the hoops they make you jump through. Twitter, Instagram, etc aren't really appropriate for many businesses. The implosion of local newspapers, yellow pages, etc that were traditional print media mean that there are loads of small businesses that are all but begging for someone to give them an easy way to swipe their credit cards and get in front of customers. Unclear that Apple has a path here.

keepquestioning 3 years ago |

I'm out if this happens.

LegitShady 3 years ago | |

to where though?

the_third_wave 3 years ago | | |

AOSP-derived Android distributions running on well-supported hardware, the same route taken by those who want to escape Google. Get your software from places like F-Droid, don't install spyware from the likes of Google/Metafacebook/Microsoft/Apple/etc, run your own services on your own hardware where possible or hitch a ride on some friend or family member's services. This works, it offers all the useable bells and whistles you might want without having your data mined by parasites.

No ads.

amelius 3 years ago | | |

If necessary a homemade RISC-V board attached to a display panel found on AliExpress.

keepquestioning 3 years ago | | |

PinePhone?

kornhole 3 years ago |

People trapped in Apple's ecosystem will put up with all of this. Only a small minority wiil be able to rewire. Apple played this very well.

braingenious 3 years ago |

I think it’s a bit funny that the author seems completely convinced that Apple will certainly create their own search service. If I were Apple, I would happily keep accepting the billions of dollars from Google in exchange for a dearly setting that costs virtually no money to implement.

Also as an aside, is it just me or is Apple News+ a downright dreadful offering? I’ll be browsing regular Apple News and it will decide to throw a paywall in front of content from The Atlantic or Vanity Fair etc.

Every time I just pull up that article for free in my browser and I’m mystified that anyone would get tricked into paying for freely available content.

Firmwarrior 3 years ago | |

Man, the news in general is just awful

I'm probably just reading the wrong news, but it all feels like pointless low-brow clickbait. I get all my tech news here and through random small blogs nowadays, and everything else is just worthless.

Like how nobody ever puts numbers into perspective. I'm always mad about how we get 100 preventable car accident deaths per day, and the other day I found out we still get vastly more deaths from smoking. Yet neither of those are in the news, instead it's all about homeless camps, racist hate crimes, etc. Nobody ever talks about Malaria at all. It's insane. Every time a car crashes and kills a toddler, they should plaster the kid's face all over the TV and social media and hold a multi week inquiry into how this happened and what we're going to do about it.

What's the point of reading the news if it doesn't teach me anything useful to my life or my voting habits?

rrdharan 3 years ago |

Thought this was gonna be about sleep tracking and the related cottage industry and how Apple was poised to be the next Sleepopolis.com or sleeplikethedead.com by leveraging the watch data for recommendations or something…

kurtoid 3 years ago |

The suggested ad placements in the images would be ugly and annoying, and would hurt the iPhone experience significantly. I couldn't see Apple doing that to it's own product

qwerty456127 3 years ago |

I will do everything I can to see no ads (paying is Okay, but Apple products already cost quite a lot so asking for more money would look like a paid toilet in an expensive restaurant) and will just leave the platform whatever I was using as soon as it insists I watch ads and leaves no escape hatches. The only kind of ads I don't mind are outdoor billboards.

georgebarnett 3 years ago |

Advertising isn’t the problem - it’s how and where it’s presented and how that influences the rest of the system.

As Apple continues to deploy ads across their platform and where they “stop” will be a good indicator of their current taste and if it survived their long expansion without Steve Jobs at the helm.

amelius 3 years ago | |

> it’s how and where it’s presented and how that influences the rest of the system.

1. I use my computer when I'm working.

2. When I'm working, I don't want to be distracted.

Where does that leave Apple's ad business?

georgebarnett 3 years ago | | |

Nowhere good really. If they force through into the space, rather than (for example) limiting themselves to boosted App Store listings, that would be clear indicator to me that their internal priorities have shifted and would be a signal to begin migrating off of their ecosystem.

marcosdumay 3 years ago | |

I am still waiting to see any company that goes into the advertising business ever deciding to stop at some point.

georgebarnett 3 years ago | | |

Yes, I agree and its a significant concern I have. If this occurs, it may be quiet some time before we see another company able to cover this use case.

lofaszvanitt 3 years ago |

Oh these companies are having uncontrolled growth...

olliej 3 years ago |

I really dislike the existence of the paid positioning in the App Store instead of fixing search and discovery in general.

I’ve said before: I don’t think Apple is going to go all in on advertising or anything, but it’s such a giant moral hazard.

As for the continued refrain of GDPR and ATT “decimating small businesses”: that’s absolute BS. If your company fails because things that require you tell people that you are spying on them, invading their privacy, and selling that information, then your business is unethical.