from Hacker News

Apple's sleeping advertising business

by azizsaya on 10/23/22, 7:29 PM with 74 comments

• by jonplackett on 10/23/22, 9:29 PM

  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.

• by alexwasserman on 10/23/22, 8:57 PM

  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.

• by codekansas on 10/23/22, 11:09 PM

  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.

• by g42gregory on 10/23/22, 11:30 PM

  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.

• by i_like_apis on 10/23/22, 11:50 PM

  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.

• by thakoppno on 10/23/22, 8:53 PM

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

• by etempleton on 10/24/22, 12:36 AM

  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.

• by AJRF on 10/23/22, 9:27 PM

  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?

• by nicolashahn on 10/23/22, 9:26 PM

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

• by ddxv on 10/24/22, 1:03 AM

  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.

• by pdpi on 10/24/22, 1:21 AM

  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.

• by seydor on 10/23/22, 9:19 PM

  > 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

• by pxue on 10/23/22, 8:43 PM

  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.

• by poulsbohemian on 10/24/22, 5:44 AM

  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.

• by keepquestioning on 10/23/22, 8:35 PM

  I'm out if this happens.

• by kornhole on 10/24/22, 5:18 AM

  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.

• by braingenious on 10/23/22, 10:54 PM

  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.

• by rrdharan on 10/23/22, 11:36 PM

  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…

• by kurtoid on 10/24/22, 1:08 AM

  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

• by qwerty456127 on 10/23/22, 9:32 PM

  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.

• by georgebarnett on 10/23/22, 9:00 PM

  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.

• by lofaszvanitt on 10/24/22, 12:44 AM

  Oh these companies are having uncontrolled growth...

• by olliej on 10/24/22, 3:33 AM

  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.