Apple just announced the addition of a native advertising platform for the new iPhone, iPod, and iPad OS 4.0. The people running AdMob over at google must be trembling in their boots this very second. AdMob has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and was just purchased by Google for $750 million, almost exclusively on the iPhone advertising market share. That is all gone now.
Apple’s advertising platform is incredible and runs completely in HTML 5. The ads are incredibly smooth and function almost like an application in themselves. They have access to certain frameworks for use by applications as well such as location and accelerometer access. In short, Apple’s new advertising platform offers an entire world of wonder that AdMob (or any other 3rd party platform) cannot even dream of.
What does this mean for publishers and advertisers? It appears to mean that mobile advertising just went pro. Advertisers can serve ads based on location and make them fully interactive. Publishers might finally actually make some real money! As for AdMob and all of the other platforms in the market that have been securing funding based on speculation, this looks to me like the end of the road.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions for this particular quote simply because they are easy to draw. Here it is:
”We do not have any plans to become a worldwide ad agency. We tried to buy a company called admob, and Google came in and snatched them from us.” - Steve Jobs
The new advertising platform is being released for use by developers as this article is being written and will be available via the new OS to end-users this summer.
