
Apple Steps Back from Its iAd Advertising Business - coloneltcb
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-iad?utm_term=.dcedkJvDgV#.phmYbVDrBL
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micheljansen
Now let's hope that this means Apple will no longer have a conflict of
interest when it comes to selling eyeballs or user data.

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givinguflac
Do you have an example of Apple "selling user data" ? Because I don't think
you do.

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micheljansen
Nope, Apple has actually taken a pretty strong stance against such practices,
but being in the ad business meant there has been pressure on Apple to do just
that (after all, more personalised ads perform better, and Apple has all the
means to provide advertisers the data they need to offer them). Now that they
have left the advertising business, that pressure is hopefully also gone.

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jonknee
Steps back? When had they stepped up? iAd was a flop from day one.

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twsted
Very good thing.

It was an annoying conflict of interest.

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Animats
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Apparently it doesn't mean less ads. Apple is just outsourcing.

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amelius
What will this mean for ad-blocking in Safari?

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rsynnott
Given than iAd never did web ads anyway, probably not a lot.

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chejazi
I imagine Apple provided a superior experience since they manage the App
development frameworks on Mac / iOS. The flop must have been inventory. A lot
of advertisers are now turning to exchanges (DoubleClick, AppNexus, OpenX...)
for inventory whereas Apple forced you to use iAd Workbench [0].

[0] [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202924](https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT202924)

EDIT: The flop must have been demand, not inventory.

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seanp2k2
I understand what you mean, but reading "demand [for ads]" in my head made me
laugh.

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mcosta
buzzfeed really? since when this has been a trusted source?

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snowwrestler
Since they hired Ben Smith from Politico.

Buzzfeed started with fluff and then grew a news operation. Most newspapers
are now having to grow their fluff operations in order to attract enough
traffic to survive (see: WashingtonPost.com).

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bitmapbrother
I wonder how Apple will spin this. Are they going to say they stepped away
from iAds because it was a conflict of interest with the "moral contract" they
had with their users or are they going to admit the truth and say it was a
financial failure.

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Bud
They've already admitted, "It's just not what we're good at."

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bitmapbrother
Which leads me to the question what would have happened if iAds was a
financial success? Would Apple still have abandoned it or would they still be
two faced and preach to the press and public, at every opportunity they get,
that they're pro-user, but conveniently leave out the fact that they sell
advertisers access to their users profile.

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tdkl
Planned obsolescence is way more profitable anyway.

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mamon
I don't know what do you mean by "planned obsolescence" in context of Apple
products. I constantly see people using few years old iPhone 4S or 7 years old
MacBooks. If by "obscolescence" you mean the fact that they release new and
better product every year then that's nothing that I would hold against them.

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JohnTHaller
There have been a few instances where someone wouldn't be too far out of line
in assuming planned obsolescence with Apple. An example would be the notorious
2008 Macbook. When Apple launched Mountain Lion in 2012, it ditched support
for the plastic Macbooks. So, that 2008 white Macbook my girlfriend bought
only got new OS updates for 3 years, which was a pretty big bummer. For
comparison, similarly equipped 2008 Windows laptops can run Windows 10 today
without much fuss. In the end, her LCD started to short out anyway -- a common
issue with Macbooks of that era -- so we got her a basic Toshiba laptop for
about 1/2 the price of a Mac. It's still humming along nicely and I just
dropped an SSD in it to give it a huge speed bump.

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wil421
My fiance has a plastic macbook (not a 2008) that is still supported and
running El Capitan. It was running sluggishly so I too dropped in and SSD and
some more RAM. The Macbook has fared well compared to my 2011 MBP which has
video card issues Apple wont fix.

Either way getting 5+ years out a laptop is outstanding. I went through a few
Sony Vaios in that amount of time during their hayday plus a brand new
computer that had the monitor go out completely. Plus I was stuck on windows
which is a big pain point for me.

Looking forward to replacing the '11 MBP once another refresh happens this
year.

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DanBC
> Either way getting 5+ years out a laptop is outstanding.

For most people who do a bit of emailing, some light www browsing, a bit of
word processing and spreadsheeting, some messaging, and some very light gaming
(solitaire): it's profoundly depressing that the needs of the bloated OS and
the modern WWW[1] drive the need for ridiculous amounts of RAM and processor
power.

[1] Not talking about app delivery here, but about a newspaper website
delivering mostly text and images with a bit of CSS, which they manage to turn
into megabytes of text. Like, I have no idea how a recipee for daal turns into
5 megabytes.

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greggman
Does this mean iOS 10 will have a system wide ad blocker and all apps will be
required to allow their ads be blocked?

Or, will there still be this split where if you want unrestricted ads you need
to make a native app instead of a web page/web app which coincidentally helps
lock-in and potential makes Apple money if the app charges for anything

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millstone
iAds have never been "unrestricted." In fact the restrictions are quite
strong, both on the content of the advertisement and any data collection [1].

If web ads had followed these guidelines, maybe content blockers would not be
so compelling.

[1] PDF: [https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-
guidelines/iAd_Conte...](https://developer.apple.com/iad/content-
guidelines/iAd_Content_Guidelines.pdf)

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makomk
Their only restriction on data collection is that you have to ask them for
permission first, and I suspect that's going away after this announcement that
Apple are no longer directly involved in approving iAd campaigns. Meanwhile,
iAd uses a whole bunch of tracking data including GPS for ad targeting, some
of which Apple forbid competing mobile advertising networks from making use
of.

Also, I notice they forbid 'messaging that identifies the particular target
for the campaign—for example, “Single men, 18–24, who live in Washington
State, click here!”.' Presumably because if customers knew just how much Apple
were helping advertisers target them, it'd spoil their whole we're-better-
than-Google line.

