Apple to relinquish control of iAd platform and drop 30 per cent fee for publishers
Apple is to relinquish control of the iAd platform and will allow publishers to handle the management of their own advertising in an effort to boost the service’s popularity and compete with rival ad networks.
The iAds platform launched in 2010 and promised slick interactive advertising within apps however Apple’s strict control of the platform has made publishers wary and the product has struggled to gain traction.
The Drum today reports that Apple has decided to take a less active approach to managing iAds and will no longer act as an intermediary between ad sellers and publishers and will stop taking a 30 per cent cut of sales.
The move is likely to have repercussions in the Australian market where iAds has a team of people working on it. Apple Australia did not respond to requests for comment.
The company’s senior vice president, Eddy Cue, announced that within the next two months the iAds sales force would become phased out entirely in place of a self-service platform that would allow publishers to keep 100 per cent of their revenue.
Ad tech firms such as The Rubicon Project, MediaMath and companies overseeing programmatic, or automated, demand-side ad buying on the platform could find themselves superfluous when the updates are made.
One Apple source told BuzzFeed that “the big publishing groups will just fold programmatic buys into the stuff they’re selling across all their properties”.
It is understood the move could come as early as next week.
Update Jan 16: A spokesman for Apple said: “We are focusing our efforts on the iAd platform. We are proud of the success which iAd has enabled for our partners, and grateful for the hard work by our dedicated sales team.”
