Apple to shut down iAd App Network on June 30

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2016
Apple on Friday announced plans to cease iAd App Network operations at the end of June, ending one facet of the company's six-year play at the mobile advertising market.




While Apple is no longer accepting apps into the ad network, developers with existing campaigns will continue to generate revenue until the June 30 end date, the company said in a post to its developer website. Content creation via iAd Workbench is now limited to currently active campaigns.

The news is in line with a report on Wednesday that said Apple plans to exit the ad selling business, but will retain iAd's scaffolding to support advertisements created, managed and monetized by publishers. Apple will no longer take a 30 percent cut of generated ad revenue as part of the deal.

It should be noted that today's announcement makes no mention of a complete iAd platform shutdown. Instead, Apple appears to be closing down the mechanism by which developers buy ad space to market their own App Store products.

In a discussion about the iOS 9 News app earlier this week, SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue said Apple is developing a self-service ad-buying tool for publishers expected to launch in the next two months.

Apple launched iAd in 2010 as an in-house advertising platform designed to leverage the iOS platform's massive installed customer base. Some analysts had high hopes for iAd, saying it was a billion dollar opportunity, but initially high ad slot pricing and heavy-handed restrictions prompted a lukewarm response from would-be advertisers.
macky the macky
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 26
    Not to be too snarky, but Apple could probably sell the iAd network to Google for a healthy profit.
  • Reply 2 of 26
    Hmm.

    I still like the idea of video iAds (ads with interactivity) for the Apple TV’s cable/satellite replacement. Make the viewer play a game (or give them some actual information to browse) and they won’t notice the time they spend throwing your garbage in their face quite as much.

    Not going to happen now, though.
    cornchip
  • Reply 3 of 26
    Not to be too snarky, but Apple could probably sell the iAd network to Google for a healthy profit.
    Google already copied everything about iAd Producer with its Web Designer in 2013, no nothing really to sell. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/30/google-web-designer-chases-market-established-by-apples-iad-producer
  • Reply 4 of 26
    steviestevie Posts: 956member
    This is a good move.  iAd was a bungled mess since day one.

    It is better to just cut their losses and move on.
  • Reply 5 of 26
    stevie said:
    This is a good move.  iAd was a bungled mess since day one.

    It is better to just cut their losses and move on.
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
  • Reply 6 of 26
    calicali Posts: 3,494member
    stevie said:
    This is a good move.  iAd was a bungled mess since day one.

    It is better to just cut their losses and move on.
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    "Cut their losses"? Did they not make money? I doubt they were losing money.

    RE:Eddy
    I'm thinking he just has too much on his plate. He's a good employee but has way too many chores.

    This news makes no sense to me. I'm thinking they've found a better advertisement strategy and are abandoning this one. I wanna see Giggle start hurting bad.
    cornchip
  • Reply 7 of 26
    stevie said:
    This is a good move.  iAd was a bungled mess since day one.

    It is better to just cut their losses and move on.
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    It takes a person committed 100% to growing that part of Apple and they need to be given wide latitude to make deals, meet goals and be completely answerable for any failures. I don't think we have that with Eddy.
    rogifan_old
  • Reply 8 of 26
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    Not to be too snarky, but Apple could probably sell the iAd network to Google for a healthy profit.
    Google already copied everything about iAd Producer with its Web Designer in 2013, no nothing really to sell.
    There's also Adobe's Edge Animate which pre-dated Apple's effort. Adobe has abandoned it now AFAIK. Of course iAd is more than iAd Producer anyway.
  • Reply 9 of 26
    gatorguy said:
    Google already copied everything about iAd Producer with its Web Designer in 2013, no nothing really to sell.
    There's also Adobe's Edge Animate which pre-dated Apple's effort. Adobe has abandoned it now AFAIK. Of course iAd is more than iAd Producer anyway.
    This page explains Adobe's strategy and why they stopped developing Edge Animate. It was only meant as a lightweight experimental app, and now they plan on incorporating its functionality into their flagship apps. They're renaming Flash Pro to Adobe Animate, so. . .

    http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/update-about-edge-tools-and-services/

    In mean time it's still available to Creative Clout Subscribers. I just downloaded it.
    edited January 2016 stevie
  • Reply 10 of 26
    robbyxrobbyx Posts: 479member
    stevie said:
    This is a good move.  iAd was a bungled mess since day one.

    It is better to just cut their losses and move on.
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    I honestly cannot understand how Eddy still has a job. Everything he manages is problematic in one way or another. Cloud services are unreliable. App stores are a mess and still don't offer obvious features like upgrade pricing. iAd has been weak since day one. He's utterly incompetent yet Forstall was squeezed out so that every exec could be a technically illiterate marketing wonk. 
    stevie
  • Reply 11 of 26
    robbyx said:
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    I honestly cannot understand how Eddy still has a job. Everything he manages is problematic in one way or another. Cloud services are unreliable. App stores are a mess and still don't offer obvious features like upgrade pricing. iAd has been weak since day one. He's utterly incompetent yet Forstall was squeezed out so that every exec could be a technically illiterate marketing wonk. 
    I don't get the hero worship of Forstall. Perhaps it plays into the narrative that people are hoping plays out with Apple. Tim Cook is the next John Sculley who will lead Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. Scott Forstall who is seen as the heir apparent of Jobs will be the one to swoop in and save the day. His first move will be to fire Tim Cook the chief bozo and all the other bozos. 

    If the rumors are to be believed, the picture about Forstall is not very good. There are rumors that he was known to take credit for successes even though he may not have had any part in it. He was also rumored to blame others for failures, even if he had a hand in those failures. He was also rumored to be extremely political. I think that the allure surrounding Forstall comes from these kinds of qualities. Steve Jobs was a great CEO but questionable human being. I believe that people are looking at that and thinking that such qualities are a prerequisite for the CEO of Apple. 

    In case people are forgetting, iAd was started while Steve Jobs was CEO. With the kinds of restrictions on it, iAd was pretty much doomed from the day one. If it was the restrictions that were getting in the way, then it doesn't matter who is sitting in Eddy Cue's chair. The result is going to be the same. 

    As for Apple Pay, I read the article. I don't see anything criticizing how Apple implemented the service itself. The problems with Apple Pay don't appear to be peculiar to Apple Pay. The problems mentioned in the article are issues that would hinder any mobile payments solution. 
  • Reply 12 of 26
    As an iOS developer, I found it much easier to work with AdSense than iAds. Even when using Apple's own XCode developer tools AdSense worked better and was easier to implement.
  • Reply 13 of 26
    vvswarup said:
    robbyx said:
    I honestly cannot understand how Eddy still has a job. Everything he manages is problematic in one way or another. Cloud services are unreliable. App stores are a mess and still don't offer obvious features like upgrade pricing. iAd has been weak since day one. He's utterly incompetent yet Forstall was squeezed out so that every exec could be a technically illiterate marketing wonk. 
    I don't get the hero worship of Forstall. Perhaps it plays into the narrative that people are hoping plays out with Apple. Tim Cook is the next John Sculley who will lead Apple to the brink of bankruptcy. Scott Forstall who is seen as the heir apparent of Jobs will be the one to swoop in and save the day. His first move will be to fire Tim Cook the chief bozo and all the other bozos. 

    If the rumors are to be believed, the picture about Forstall is not very good. There are rumors that he was known to take credit for successes even though he may not have had any part in it. He was also rumored to blame others for failures, even if he had a hand in those failures. He was also rumored to be extremely political. I think that the allure surrounding Forstall comes from these kinds of qualities. Steve Jobs was a great CEO but questionable human being. I believe that people are looking at that and thinking that such qualities are a prerequisite for the CEO of Apple. 

    In case people are forgetting, iAd was started while Steve Jobs was CEO. With the kinds of restrictions on it, iAd was pretty much doomed from the day one. If it was the restrictions that were getting in the way, then it doesn't matter who is sitting in Eddy Cue's chair. The result is going to be the same. 

    As for Apple Pay, I read the article. I don't see anything criticizing how Apple implemented the service itself. The problems with Apple Pay don't appear to be peculiar to Apple Pay. The problems mentioned in the article are issues that would hinder any mobile payments solution. 
    According to John Gruber the biggest advocate for iAd within Apple was Scott Forstall and after Forstall left no one else's heart was really in it. He said he's surprised that it took Apple this long to shut it down.

    i agree with you though about the Forstall narrative. Part of it too is people tend to look at the past with rose colored glasses. So everything in the past was good but sucks now. It must have been pretty bad with Forstall because Apple's press release announcing the org changes never even thanked Forstall for his service and Cook's internal employee memo just had one line thanking him. Also, Apple never refuted any of the rumors that came out after the announcement. Contrast that to when Greg Christie retired; immediately Apple PR was out with a statement refuting the notion that he left on bad terms. Also read the press release of Bob Mansfield and Peter Oppemheimer's retirements. Glowing and full of praise and thanks.

    I remember something Ben Thompson said on a podcast once. He owns the blog Stratechery and was an intern at Apple. He said all interns get to meet with each member of the executive team. He said he was most impressed with Tim Cook and that Scott Forstall came across as someone who knew he was the smartest guy in the room and wanted you to know that too. My guess is Forstall's worst tendencies were kept in check when Steve was alive and after Steve died tensions that always existed bubbled up. And Tim Cook doesn't want conflict. He wants an executive team that gets along and can work together. 
    cornchipargonaut
  • Reply 14 of 26
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    It takes a person committed 100% to growing that part of Apple and they need to be given wide latitude to make deals, meet goals and be completely answerable for any failures. I don't think we have that with Eddy.
     And yet it's rumored he's interested in Apple acquiring Time Warner. Oy vey. Perhaps Apple should spin off its content business and let Eddy run it if he wants. Then bring someone in to run cloud services that actually knows what they're doing in that space. Maybe then we'd see much bigger improvements with Siri, Maps, iCloud and Apple's pro software.
  • Reply 15 of 26
    How many of you are happy Google has one less competitor in its core business? Be honest.
  • Reply 16 of 26
    I would bet that Apple is going to take the stance that the necessary tracking done by advertising goes against their policy for tracking customers in this way, therefore they cannot be in this business directly.
  • Reply 17 of 26
    As an iOS developer, I found it much easier to work with AdSense than iAds. Even when using Apple's own XCode developer tools AdSense worked better and was easier to implement.
    As an iOS developer I have found that iAds pays me more than any other network. It will be interesting to see how this develops.
    cornchip
  • Reply 18 of 26
    knowitallknowitall Posts: 1,648member
    iFlop
    steviejfanningsingularity
  • Reply 19 of 26
    misamisa Posts: 827member
    cali said:
    Is there anything under Eddy that isn't? An article just came out about merchants not signing on to Pay. Apple took for granted that merchants would just sign on and they haven't. Whole Foods is the only merchant that has Pay in every one of its stores. I love it but I've got maybe 2 or 3 stores where I can use it. And they're all grocery stores.

    http://www.pymnts.com/news/2016/apple-pays-merchant-problem/
    "Cut their losses"? Did they not make money? I doubt they were losing money.

    RE:Eddy
    I'm thinking he just has too much on his plate. He's a good employee but has way too many chores.

    This news makes no sense to me. I'm thinking they've found a better advertisement strategy and are abandoning this one. I wanna see Giggle start hurting bad.
    Ads are kinda on a "on the way out" phase right now. They'll be back once the glut of inventory and lack of quality advertisers dies down. And no, ad blockers are not to blame here.

    To give you an idea, If your site generates one million impressions per DAY, and is making only 10$ per day (CPM of 0.01) You're better off just removing the ads and save the visitors the annoyance. Google Adwords is CPC (paid only when clicked on), Google DoubleClick has CPM. Effective CPM from Google on most sites is well under 0.05 CPM, that's why you set a floor rate so that advertisers looking for "nearly free" advertising on sites with "max fill" selected don't lower your CPM.

    And CPC ads are garbage-tier for most sites anyway. You never want Google in your ad chain if you can avoid it because it drives down paying ads. The only thing worse than Google are some tiny in-house solutions, and all the malware-laced piracy/porn websites (because, who is going to report a bad ad on a piracy site? nobody otherwise that site goes bye-bye)

    Newspaper sites and clickbait sites have driven down ad prices to the point that many of these sites only exist because their hosting is cheap and they are getting the bandwidth for free. There their are sites that are just nothing but auto-refresh ads every 30 seconds with a tiny piece of content on them. The owners of those sites probably just keep the web browser window open all day on all their devices.


    cornchip
  • Reply 20 of 26
    gatorguy said:
    Google already copied everything about iAd Producer with its Web Designer in 2013, no nothing really to sell.
    There's also Adobe's Edge Animate which pre-dated Apple's effort. Adobe has abandoned it now AFAIK. Of course iAd is more than iAd Producer anyway.
    So are you saying Google copied from Adobe and not Apple?
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