Apple to relinquish control of iAd platform and open it up to publishers for free
Apple is relinquishing control of its iAd platform to allow publishers to handle the management of their own advertising in the hope that it will boost the service's popularity and help it better compete with rival ad networks.
iAds
The iAds platform promised slick interactive advertising within apps when it launched in 2010, however Apple’s tight grasp on the creation, selling, and management of the platform kept publishers at bay and the service failed to take off.
Six years on, Apple has decided to take a less active approach to managing iAds. It will no longer act as an intermediary between ad sellers and publishers and will stop taking a 30 per cent cut of sales.
The company’s senior vice president, Eddy Cue, announced that within the next two months the iAds sales force would become phased out entirely in place of a self-service platform that would allow publishers to keep 100 per cent of their revenue.
Ad tech firms such as The Rubicon Project, MediaMath and companies overseeing programmatic, or automated, demand-side ad buying on the platform could find themselves superfluous when the updates are made.
One Apple source told BuzzFeed that “the big publishing groups will just fold programmatic buys into the stuff they’re selling across all their properties”.
By handing over its tightly controlled marketing data and implementing a new publisher-driven platform Apple is looking to make strides in growing its less than impressive 5.1. per cent share of the mobile display advertising revenue market and close the gap to Google’s 9.5 per cent and Facebook’s 37.9 per cent.