• Mobile Advertising
Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo, citing a single Tweet from Craig Hockenberry as their motivation, talks a bit about Apple’s recent note that apps using geolocation to provide targeted advertising will be rejected.
So it’s not too much of a stretch to see Apple’s ad platform in the future being the best way to deliver ads in apps, which might offer perks like, say, location-based targeted advertising, or more dynamic ads than you can do now on an iPhone. It’s also not crazy to think Apple’s way is going to be the only way to get some of those features, like location-based ads.
The point is easy to miss, so I’ll spell it out a bit. Apple’s plan isn’t to remove anyone’s ability to use location data for ads. What Buchanan is suggesting — and the conclusion I came to myself — is that Apple wants to provide those ads themselves.
Rather than pulling ads from any of the countless mobile ad providers, it would be more suited to Apple’s interests for you to get your ads through a framework. Core Advertising, if you will. Developers include a few lines of code and get ad supported lite versions of their apps which conveniently pay out through the same system that cuts the checks for App Store revenue. A single point of payment.
The Gizmodo article also points out Apple’s use of the word primarily. If the only reason you’re using Core Location is to serve ads, you will be rejected. Why? Simple, Apple recognizes the danger of allowing app developers to control overall user experience. Right now, a modal alert pops up when you launch a location-enabled app for the first time. As a user, I see this alert as a layer of privacy protection. My iPhone correctly assumes that I don’t want to share this information with just anyone, and cautions me on a per-app basis.
Now imagine this alert pops for every app.
What Apple doesn’t want is for users to be conditioned to hit OK without consideration, and even less so for users to be inundated with alerts (shades of Windows).
By providing advertising functionality by way of a developer framework, Apple can take a cut of the money, make the process of creating ad-supported apps easier for developers, and distill the user experience down to a single “allow advertising based on your current location” option within settings.
So long as ads not based on location can still be pulled freely from third-parties like Fusion and The Deck, I would view this as a fair compromise.