Article 12; Apple Edges into Selling of App Ads

This week’s article was obtained from the New York Times website, and was written by Brad Stone. The article is titled: “Apple Edges into Selling of App Ads”. The article discusses the new desire that Apple Inc. has to include ads in all of the applications that function on their products.

New software has been developed called iAd which can be used on the iPhone, iPod and iPad devices. The offer from Apple to application developers was to give them 60 percent of all revenue obtained from the ads that ran on their programs. Steve Jobs, chief of the Apple company, commented that unlike Google: “Search is not where it’s at” on phones, he said. “People are not searching on a mobile device like they are on the desktop”.

For this reason, Apple looked to adding ads to applications for maximum exposure to mobile device users. To the consumer, this is good news in terms of cost. “This is not a get-rich-quick scheme for Apple,” Mr. Jobs said. “This is us helping our developers make money so they can survive and keep the prices of their apps reasonable.”

Michael Gartenberg, a partner with the consulting firm Altimeter Group, added the comment that “It shows that Apple is really committed to building out a rich apps ecosystem, which has always been their main differentiator from competitors”.

The iAd software will be part of version 4.0 of the Apple iPhone Operating system. “That software will also include one much-anticipated feature, the ability to run multiple non-Apple applications at the same time”. This feature will not fully run on “older iPhone 3G.” That is, some features of the new 4.0 version will not work. As for the release date of the new OS version, “the new software will be available for owners of recent iPhone and iPod Touch models this summer, and for the iPad later in the year”.

Main Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/09/technology/09apple.html?ref=technology

Second Article:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-iAd-Could-Generate-Billions-in-Revenue-Says-Analyst-136641/