Apple is reportedly giving up control of its ad business, no longer taking a 30% commision on all sales on its iAds platform.
BuzzFeed News reports that Apple is planning a new system: Rather than acting as an intermediary between advertisers and content partners, Apple will create a system that lets ad sellers and publishers work things out on their own. In exchange, Apple will no longer being taking a 30 percent cut of iAd sales, letting publishers keep all of their revenue.
The iAds platform promised slick interactive advertising within apps when it launched in 2010, however Apple’s high control on the creation, selling, and management of the platform kept publishers at bay and the service failed to take off.
Apple currently has a small 5.1% share of the mobile display advertising revenue market, compared to Google’s 9.5% and Facebook’s 37.9%.
“It’s just not something we’re good at,” one source told BuzzFeed News.
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% of their revenue.
The move could be bad news for ad tech firms that facilitate programmatic demand -side ad buying on the platform,as their role would become obsolete.
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”.
Source: BuzzFeed