Apple Announces iAds: Now There’s No Reason For Your Apps To Cost Money

John Brownlee ()

Apple Announces iAds: Now There’s No Reason For Your Apps To Cost Money

Well, looks like that purchase of Quattro really paid off. Steve Jobs just announced iAd, Apple’s own mobile advertising network for app developers.

According to Jobs, an average person spends 30 minutes in an app each day. If an ad is served every 3 minutes, it’s ten ads a day. Multiply that by 100 million devices, and it’s a billion ads a day.

iAds will function in-app. You click on them, but you never get pulled to a browser: they work like innate features of the app. You can even make them games.

It’s a great idea: ads can be freely explored without stopping what you’re doing or psychologically breaking up the experience of an app with getting information.

This is such a simple innovation, but it’s huge. Apple’s done something truly unique here: they’ve figured out a compelling way to compete with Google in the mobile advertising space. I didn’t think it can be done.

And what do developers get out of this? 60% of the revenues, after Apple has sold the ads.

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[image via Gizmodo]

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About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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  • Steven UK

    I really, really hope developers keep the paid versions of their apps too – okay if they want to develop one that is free with ads but I WILL NOT be downloading them, I would rather pay 59p, 99p, £1.19 for an app with no bloody ads! Americans may love ads, I do not want anything popping up every 3 minutes on my iPhone, thank you very much.

  • http://www.joeldcb.com Joel

    I really really really don’t like this. Today Apple have sold their core to the red man… It just seems to me to be the antithesis of the cool, clean apple style we all love.

  • charli

    i look at it this way. I would rather pay $$$ for no ads. but that doesn’t always happen. So at least if there’s ads I’d rather have them done in a way that’s native to the app and hopefully we’ll have less crashing, less auto quitting a game and losing points and other odd things that have I’ve had happen

    and yes I agree that I hope folks will have a paid way to turn off apps and that they don’t try to crazy double dip with a high price and ads

  • Injun Joe

    @ Joel

    “Today Apple have sold their core to the red man…”

    WTF??? That sure sounds to me like some racist, anti-aboriginal words.

    What kinda smoke signals are you sending whitebread?

  • Ray

    If for any reason I’m forced to view ads on any of my Apple machines, I’m trashing my iPhone and I will run Linux on every Apple Xserve, Mac Mini and MacBook I own. I’m almost ready to trash the iPhone because Jobs is making the decision that I will never be able run Flash my iPhone that I paid for … it’s as if Sony decided that I can only watch content produced be them on my Sony TV … Jobs is one of those geniuses with no common sense.

  • jacob

    I think the idea of forcing more pop-up ads is a bad idea.

    Apple- If i start seeing unwanted ads i will just buy a windows mobile phone or android phone. this is bad enough i have all the add on my home computer, i dont want to see them on my phone.. this is a bad idea, and i hope people refuse to buy apple products unless the block all ads.

    so what now? apple will sell an app to block ads?