Gurman, one of the most reliable Apple leakers we know, has claimed that Apple Maps will very soon start including ads in the same style as those that already exist in the App Store. In addition: most likely they will also reach other native services of the system, such as books, podcasts or the stock market.
Is this an appropriate novelty? Let’s see what each part gets:
- Apple Earn money from advertising revenue that you weren’t earning before.
- developers they gain visibility… as long as they pay the price.
- The users we are more exposed to advertising in a product (the iPhone) that we pay for, in services that often (Books, Podcasts) also include internal payments.
It seems that no one here earns as much as Apple.
This ad as we know it in the App Store basically works as follows:
- Developers bid on a keyword (“task manager”, “run”, “recipes”, “puzzles”…).
- Whoever bids the most gets the ad that appears when searching for that keyword in the App Store.
The problem is that keywords aren’t always so innocent. We have often seen dumping between developers. A developer of a Twitter client may bid on the term “Twitter” and understand it to be an acceptable metonym for an application open to such third-party development.
Instead, we often see examples of apps paying to appear first in searches for specific names from their competitors. An invented example (although in the image that leads the article there is a real one): as if Things bought the search for “Todoist”. The user is not looking for something generic, but rather for a specific application. But since his rival pays, he appears in first place (marked as an ad and shaded blue, but in first place after all).
you can give the ridiculous situation of a developer having to pay to appear in their own search and thus prevent your rival from paying more and appearing first.
Do we want to see this extended to podcasts, books and other system services? Will someone looking for the nearest McDonald’s come across the Burger King ad? If it affects a multinational, imagine how it can affect neighborhood business.
This situation is the one that is about to be generated (this is already happening with applications) in other environments due to the initiative of the largest company in the world that is breaking record after record in billing and profits . Is it a secondary activity that all parties are satisfied with?
In infinite loop
This is one of this week’s episodes of Infinite Loop, the daily podcast of Appleswill, broadcast from Monday to Friday at 7:00 a.m. (Spanish peninsula time), in which we talk about Apple and its competition seen through the prism of the Cupertino company. This is a ten-minute podcast, presented by Javier Lacort and edited by Santi Araujo.
And these are the other episodes of this week, you can listen to them in full from this page.
#654: Ten against a thousand
Apple has invested ten million dollars in Futuro Studios, a podcast production company, to turn its successful podcasts into productions for Apple TV+. Spotify, for its part, is taking a much deeper bet on podcasting.
#656: Revisiting the AirPods Max
18 months later, a meeting with the AirPods Max to talk about how my use and perception of them has evolved over that time.
#657: Google Photos and scans
A tricky scenario with a California dad and an event after taking a photo that was uploaded to Google Photos can lead to some collective thinking about how cloud content analytics work.
#658: The 14th, the 7th
We have already cleared the doubts: on September 7, the Apple event will take place, during which we will most likely see new iPhones and Apple Watch. Some highly filtered comments on certain aspects of iPhone 14 including model scheme, eSIM factor, price hike or loss of notch.
Subscribe to the infinite loop
You can listen to Infinite Loop from any podcast manager:
Or by directly searching for “Infinite Loop” in your favorite client. Each new episode is released daily at the following times:
- Europe (peninsular time): 7:00 a.m.
- Europe (Canarian time): 6:00 a.m.
- Mexico: 0.00h
- Argentina: 3h00
- Colombia: 1h00
- Chile: 3h00
- United States (east coast): 1h00
- United States (West Coast): 10:00 p.m.
We will hear from you next Monday. Thank you for accompanying us.
Table of Contents
