8-4-2010
As part of its iPhone OS 4.0 release event, Apple announced the iAd platform for in-mobile, in-app advertising. Steve Jobs debuted Apple’s own advertising network. He said that the average user spends 30 minutes a day in apps, and that soon the iPhone would have the capability to serve a billion ad impressions a day , “an incredible demographic.” iAd will seemingly use location as a main ingredient to deliver ads. iAd will actually be run directly from iPhone OS 4.0 and users will not actually ever leave the app that they are in. From what Jobs showed, Apple wants to focus on video ads.
This is the latest step in the competition heating up between Apple and Google for the mobile advertising market. Many analysts view this offering as a direct competitor to Google, especially in light of Google’s recent acquisition of Admob followed by Apple’s acquisition of Quattro Wireless.
Steve Jobs directly addressed Google’s mobile strategy by saying:
“On a mobile device, search is not where it’s at, not like on the desktop. They’re spending all their time on these apps — they’re using apps to get to data on the Internet, not generalized search” It is worth mentioning that Google has more than 97 % of the mobile search market.
It will be interesting to see what Google’s counter-move will be especially in light of the expected exponential growth of the Android platform.
[...] capability to push selected advertising to compete with Google. If we also factor in the ‘iAD’ factor on the mobile front with an estimated one billion ad impressions per day, we find that competition for advertising [...]