Apple Is Warning People About Clicking Ads
In class we have been talking about the price of pay-per-click ads and the history and implementation of these different forms of advertising in ways that seem to always benefit the retailer (the company purchasing the ad space), as long as he is making a profit off of those ads. I ran into an article that is extremely interesting because it touches on an aspect of online advertising that we have yet to talk about.
In the article “Now apple is warning people about clicking ads”, a very interesting perspective on what real-life ad competition is like is reflected upon. As it turns out, Apple’s new iOS9 allows people to more easily avoid and ignore ads on their safari page, which has made advertisers extremely angry, considering they have a hard time already getting people to click on their links in the first place. To add to this inter-company conflict, Apple’s News App now has a pop-up screen that shows itself every time someone clicks on a side ad, whatever it may be. Essentially, Apple is angry at companies like Google that gain revenue from selling ad space, because, as Tim Cook put it, the internet shouldn’t be damped by ads on all sides, all the time. This doesn’t come without it’s own tinge of hypocrisy though; Apple’s policy for selling ads on their News App (yes they sell ads on there) was initially met with a positive response, because retailers can keep anywhere between 70-100 percent of the revenue on their ads. As it turned out over time, the retailers ended up disliking the News app as every one of their ads can be blocked by a screen (that isn’t considered illegal), telling the user that he must leave his app before seeing the ad, and whether he wants to see it or return to the News app. An example is shown here on the link to the website.
Apple argues that the web space sold on a regular web page by Google is in fact not the real product that they are selling, but that the real thing being sold to retailers is the users themselves. Tim Cook argued that it was the users that were being monetized through this process and not the web space itself. This leads to a hole in the entire auctioning of web ads because even though the auctioning process is the same as always and hasn’t changed in response to Apple’s different antics, Retailers now have to weigh in whether they want to buy ads that may end up on Apple related servers as they are bound to be seen less. Thus, retailers have to now weigh into their ad operations the fact that they may be paying for ads that are being ignored by customers and made harder to view by the very people selling them the space to put them on.
http://digiday.com/publishers/apple-news-mixed-message-advertisers/