Apple's Walled Garden: iAds and html5:
Apple's Walled Garden: iAds and html5:
Apple is building a wall around the lush garden that is the app store. Their end-game is to keep everybody happy by funneling mass amounts of advertising monies. How will this work? Grab an Orange and follow me…
Jobs’s company needs to do two major things to capture consumers:
- Have the best content
- Offer that content for relatively nothing
This is where iAds comes into play. Apple plans to launch iAds as a premium advertising campaign, and has hinted at charging premium prices. With this in mind, developers can incorporate these emotionally interactive ads as a viable revenue module. Developers can focus on delivering a great experience while Apple handles the monetization. It’s a win for consumers and it’s a win for developers.
So who loses? Maybe no one. If Apple has increased our content consumption by making it more efficient (mobile), then they’ve just created more eyespace for ads rather than taking it from someone else. With advertising budgets already in a stranglehold from cutbacks, I’m inclined to believe the opposite. Smart companies will wager their advertising dollars towards a more interactive media. Big Traditional Media (BTM) will start to see their ad revenues fade. Especially print, until it migrates…
As Apple gives developers a piece of their advertising pie, they’re also building a wall to keep developers eating what they’re cooking.
Here’s the brick and mortar:
1) Apple just restricted the use of any interpretive language or language other than Objective C.
- This makes it that much harder for developers to transfer their apps across platforms. Apple just burned down Titanium’s bridge.
2) Apple just restricted anyone from sending any app analytics out of the app.
- This hinders the targeting of other ad networks. As a side effect, it also makes it impossible for developers to gauge user experience (not good Apple). I’d be very surprised if they didn’t come out with some sort of standard analytics platform.
It’s easy to see how Apple will incorporate their own ad system:
I predict they’ll either classify ads themselves or have users classify/keyword their ads in order to define what consumer group each ad should target.
I also predict that iAds will be smarter ads. Since each one has a category attached to them (see prediction above), the ad-showcasing algorithm can send data back to Apple’s servers on what ads that user has been responding to. That users responds great to restaurant ads? Great, send them some more restaurant ads…
But what about html5. Why won’t other networks jump on board? Apple can’t stop other ad networks from implementing html5 ads. What they can do is filter out the bad ones (see app approval process) and deliver the most well-targeted ads to date since they have access to all of the user data. The more well-targeted, the higher the CTR, which means that more developers will be motivated to create apps for users. This is what Apple is banking on and if you take a look at user’s time spent mobile searching vs. mobile app time (30 mins/day), they’re right.
This strategy, however crude, could make the iPhone the developers platform of choice while other platforms (google) are left in the wake.
-Brian
If you made it this far, you should follow me on Twitter. Follow @jprichardson
-JP