iAds
Historically, Steve Jobs likes to keep the biggest announcement for last. The last announcement in yesterdays iPhone OS 4.0 preview was iAds.
I’m not sure if many people understand how big of a deal this is.
Watch yesterday’s presentation and skip to about 44:00. What Apple has done is created a platform for companies to offer experiences for consumers within an existing app. And to clarify, these experiences are less like ads and more like apps themselves. Video. Audio. Games. Maps. Even App Store downloads and wallpapers. Delivered straight to the intended audience.
The reason for iAds is pretty straight forward (read: another revenue stream) but I believe there are other benefits.
- Cruft reduction. Many of the apps on the App Store are pure marketing. A map of store locations with coupons and product info. With iAds, you can deliver these apps to users without advertising to get them to search for your company in the App Store (in short, no more marketing for marketing). This will render most of the marketing and brand app useless and they can stop polluting the ecosystem.
- iAd development. Ads are now full apps themselves, HTML 5 or not. Who’s going to make them? They are certainly not simple to create, with maps, web services and interactivity. It opens up an entirely new service market for devs to enter.
- Simplicity. No more crappy Google ads in your apps. These are SDK sanctioned UIKit components. Drop an iAd container in your nib and collect the revenue (hopefully). There won’t be many devs that won’t switch over to iAds the second they are able.
I hope that Apple can execute on this as well as they’ve presented it. It’s a huge new chapter of the iPhone OS story and an even bigger deal to an army of devs drowning in a sea of opportunity.
It may well be the masterstroke that no one saw coming.
