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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

iAd is the ultimate FU to Google.

The cheap way to pay them back for Android would have been to banish Google from the iPhone. Instead, they're attempting to transform mobile advertising into something where Google's technical strengths are worthless, while their weaknesses - user interfaces, platform fragmentation, and apps - are a serious liability.

Worse, Apple is right - mobile ads do suck. Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld. This is an 'aha' moment akin to when Google launched adwords. If iAd is easy to develop for and deployed across millions of devices, Google's ambitions for mobile are in serious trouble.

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They're certainly picking a fight. It's far from clear that they'll win.

If the iPhone loses its dominance in smart phones, this move will have done nothing but antagonize the most obvious heir to the throne. Like nearly everything else Apple does, iAds will have a monopoly on a small market. Meanwhile, much of the iPhone's greatness depends on Google's own products....

What, search and maps?

Of course! Everyone assumes that Bing is just a drop-in replacement for Google, but it doesn't come without costs: Google has a massive brand identity. The phone with Google search has an implicit advantage over the phone with "Bing".

It's not like Google's gonna block iPhones from Google search.

Google is the default search engine of most Microsoft users. There's no way the iPhone is going to lose Google search. Meanwhile, search is simply not a huge part of my iPhone experience.

Maps is actually a bigger deal to me --- but maps is also easier to replace.

Google is spending upwards of a billion US dollars to make Street View, in the process creating a top-notch street map of the World. And now they provide that data free, I doubt Google maps is so easily replaced, even with Bing Maps.

I actually prefer Bing maps, because I believe it supports really nice zooming with Seadragon?

Google Maps is clearly necessary on the iPhone but Google Search could be easily replaced with Bing.

...and Apple bought a mapping company last year: PlaceBase.

I have tried using bing for search, and it did not cut it, yet. Unless you are only searching in English. I search in German, too, occasionally.

However I found maps.bing.com to be quite enjoyable and in some aspects superior to maps.google.com -- e.g. bing's "birds eye view".

You do realize that there is no smartphone dominance of apple, right? It's basically RIM (US) and Nokia(rest of the world) that are dominating.

If you're looking solely at market share. Look at the profits from smartphones and Apple is dominating.

My girlfriend has a Nokia E55. It is not even remotely close to iPhone and Androids in terms of functionality and ease of use, and still most market share studies will categorize it as a smartphone. And its OS also barely changed since 4 years ago when I had a similar device.

iPhone have a lot of mind share, though.

Nobody gives a crap about phones for which nobody buys apps. That would be.... all of them, except the iPhone.

"nobody"? I was just mentioning it, because i am sick of seeing people sucked into that apple marketing dream and telling it over and over again.

Let's take the whole mobile phone market as measurement. The iphone is still only used by the vast minority, yet it feels like apple users are caught by all that marketing and buzz around apple they reject reality.

Yes, of course, the iPhone has the appstore, it's good hardware and software and shiny and usable and so on. But the reality is STILL that it's a minority.

The reality is that the big old mobile companies have still enough money, resources and potential customers to get. It's just not that Nokia is making all the fuzz around this as the press does about apple. Steve Jobs farts, press coverage instantly. It's sick.

Interesting Steve quote from Q&A:

    We don’t know much about the advertising stuff. We’re
    learning. We tried to buy a company called AdMob, the
    biggest mobile advertising company. But Google came
    in and snatched them from us. They didn’t want us to 
    have them. So we bought another smaller company, 
    Quattro Wireless. They are teaching us. But we are 
    babes in the woods. We are learning as fast as we can.

edit: Mostly referring to the 'babe in the woods' comment, along with his perspective on the AdMob purchase.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/11/14/apple_met_with...

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/04/apple-acquires-quattro-wire...

For all the propaganda you sometimes get from Apple it’s really astonishing how openly Jobs sometimes says stuff like that. I like it. Not something many CEOs would say on the day they announce their entrance into the ad business.

IIRC, Jobs made a similar statement about being a novice when introducing the first Xserves, acknowledging that this was not an area in which Apple historically had strength, but that this was a first offering.

He also made a similar statement with the release of iTunes 1.0 back in '01, as Apple took far longer to embrace digital music than other companies.

Makes more sense if you note that Apple is among the voices framing Google as the new Microsoft -- a 900-pound octopus with a tentacle in every market.

Funny, I would see Apple as the new Microsoft, not Google.

I thought the opposite, now Google will have easier time in its anti trust issues, because they can claim they are not a monopoly.

"Nobody clicks on them, because launching a web browser from an app is incredibly disruptive on a handheld."

Most mobile ad networks doing in-app advertising switched to a web view within the application months ago. In addtion, clickthrough rates are generally pretty high - although I blame 'butterfingers' for a lot of this. (Tracking post-click conversions is hard to do on the iPhone platform but when we've done it I haven't been horribly impressed.)

Well, launching a web browser from an app is a lot less disruptive when you have multitasking.

This will be big because game makers will buy these by the boatload. I'll go on record right now predicting game ads will be over 80% of what you see on these.

If game makers take up this approach in force, that will be a fair sight better than the status quo of supporting "free" games by way of in-app purchases (that are essentially mandatory to get the full experience of the game).

I know some game makers, and I'm pretty sure none of them like the current paradigm much either. It's a pain in the ass. Because of the horrendous distribution system, to succeed on the iPhone you have to be constantly gaming the app store, and every hour you spend doing that is an hour you didn't spend making your game better.

This is why we've never touched it. On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users. We don't have to constantly release new versions and incentivize users to download them just to get ourselves back in the top 20. There are some tricks, of course, but they're less of a detour from the desired path, if that makes sense.

iAds will make success on the platform a numbers game. Every free app will run it because it can't pay worse than the current options, even with the 40% rake. Paid apps will break out the spreadsheet and almost certainly find a CPA below the app's price for a paid one. My totally off-the-cuff guess is that with a really engaging iAd you'll end up paying $1 to sell a $2 app, at which point it's all about volume. Selling a million like that might be doable, and now we're talking money in line with what Facebook apps can make.

Still, the problem will be that the most successful iPhone apps make about the same amount lifetime that the most successful Facebook apps make in a month. But the odds of succeeding may now be high enough to make it a worthwhile play.

On Facebook, we just have to make our users want to invite other users.

Maybe the App Store needs iAd/GameKit integration of a 'like'/'recommend'-to-friends feature.

The only issue might be privacy. Your phone book is full of people, 90+% of whom probably do not have an iPhone. On Facebook, every one of your Facebook contacts has clearly already divulged to you that they are on Facebook.

Still, I imagine if Apple made an opt-out method of automatically friending all of your email contacts who have iPhones (or at least an opt-out method of seeing them) it would be popular.

Seems to me like their "Game Center" thing might address this. I personally avoid Facebook, but if I look at my iPhone and can see that 3 of my friends are playing a particular game, I would be influenced much the way I imagine folks who receive Facebook game invites do.

Actually, I'd probably be influenced more, since I know some Facebook games force you to recommend it in order to get access. But if this game center, like XBox Live, can just show me what my friends are actually playing... that's the best endorsement they can give me :)

It has been against Facebook's rules to force you to recommend it for a couple years now. No app that exists for more than a week does that.

Mobile ads probably need 'bookmark for later' as a primary option, as in: I'm in the middle of something else right now, but that's interesting enough to review when I have time.

While its true mobile ads suck, its not like others couldn't have done advertisements that are just as interactive as the ones Steve demoed. I'm feel like a large reason why they haven't become popular is because advertising companies don't have the know how to do this sort of thing.

That said, iAds will be successful just because its Apples advertising platform and very high profile.

The beauty of iAds is that it plays to Apple's strengths. In particular, they're the one handset manufacturer that has a unified platform large enough to support an advertising platform and an OS capable of rich interactive ads. Google could have built iAd years ago, but it isn't in their DNA and the fragmentary nature of Android might make it difficult to deploy.

Perhaps iAds will work because of Apple's well known approval process. It's one thing to create interactive ads, it another to keep the quality high enough in general that people bother to click them.

If I were Apple, I'd let users vote ads up or down. Not only would this improve the ads and UX, the data would be a goldmine!

They can probably track how long you "interact" with the ad. That's probably much better data than providing up/down votes.

Exactly. This is a fucking big deal :)

Being a Facebook developer I've pretty much ignored the iPhone up until now because of the distribution problems. This makes it tempting.

Interesting comment by Jobs (disingenuous ?), that "we don't know much about advertising; we're babes in the woods."

Wolf cubs, maybe. =)

So what prevents Google from serving similar Admob ads?

from Gizmodo live coverage:

Q: And can people use stuff other than iAd and Game Center?

Steve: Yes, you can use any service.

Nothing. But likewise, Google's core competence in search doesn't help them at all, while iAd will be baked into the development kit, App Store, and millions of devices.

true but Admod is cross platform, and if Google offers a better deal that could also provide an incentive. It's not automatically game-over because the magical Steve Jobs thinks he invented advertising

Sure - just like the iPad isn't going to kill off the Kindle overnight. Still, when a competitor can put out a product that halves your market share in its first week on the market, you sit up and take notice.

Everything Google's done in the last few years has seemed bent on extending their search ads monopoly to mobile devices. If success was counted based on devices shipped, Android was doing pretty well. iAd is a serious setback if it turns out to be more profitable than mobile browser ads.

Again what prevent Google from offering those types of interactive ads on webapps with HTML5 and js? you can still get creative with ads, and no one halved anyones market today.

This was detailed in the presentation. Using Google's Admob ads presumably will not be as seamless of an experience for the app developer.

It'll be harder to implement things like keeping the user in the app while viewing the ad or adding video/photos.

What if using Apple's ad network is few lines of code? No library to import, or have a 3rd party dependency on your app.

As I suspected, iAd API's are tightly coupled with the OS and dead simple to utilize. I just wrote a sample app. Too bad Apple won't allow further discussions on the subject matter. Everyone who views the new beta API references are under NDA.

Although I believe Steve, new clauses in the iPhone Developers License Agreement seem to restrict the use of information off the phone rather dramatically - including information used for basic ad targeting. If enforced, it'll kneecap a lot of competitors.

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