Jobs predicts iAds will steal 48% of mobile advertising market | Hacker News Reader

Jobs predicts iAds will steal 48% of mobile advertising market

venturebeat.com

15 pointsthiele19 comments

> claims that 48% of spending on mobile advertising in the United States

So, to clarify, that's 48% by dollars not number of ads served. And it's US only.

48% implies an accuracy of plus or minus 1%. I don't care how fancy the spreadsheet that gave them that prediction was, that number appears to have been sourced from someone's posterior. There's no way they can predict it with that accuracy.

I'd believe that it's a target, or a goal, but that still doesn't sound right. Why wouldn't they aim for 50% or 51%? Why can they almost, but not quite, capture a majority? An attempt to manage expectations?

I don't see why 48% would imply an accuracy of less than ±1%. When people make predictions or forecasts, they typically don't include error margins when talking to the public. For example, the US 2010 deficit forecast is $1.17 trillion. I have no idea where one could find the margin of error for that forecast.

There are two significant figures in "48%" so one assumes that it means ±1% unless some other accuracy level is supplied.

Maybe it's overly pedantic of me to suppose that they even know what significant figures are, but even so, I can't find any reasonable way for them to arrive at a statistic like that doesn't involve making up numbers.

I'm not sure why your comment is a child of mine. I was just clarifying the post title which left some things out. You're commenting on the unrelated issue of how accurate the prediction is.

So I understand the delivery part of this technology and the appeal to app developers, but what does the ad creation side look like? I mean is someone (at Apple?) hand-coding html/css/js for each of these ads? Or will there be an authoring tool analogous to the Flash dev environment?

As far as I've understood, Apple has said that they will handcraft the very first ads. I assume that they will introduce tools/APIs to do ads later, but if I memory serves me correctly, they haven't confirmed this.

I can see that they do it this way for two reasons: first, typical Apple priorization: no time to do everything with limited resources so they first do tools for themselves and then polish them for others. Second, by doing polished ads themselves, they create an example of ad-culture they want.

Interesting aspect of iAds is that they require a much more work than e.g. Google Adwords. This means that an ad agency ecosystem will evolve around these ads. My guess is that agencies that specialize on these ads will have to take a big role in selling these ads to advertisers. Which might be exactly what Apple wants.

Interesting. Yeah I mean even the average interactive ad where a couple screens of text slide in and then some links appear requires a bunch of back and forth and refinement in my experience, so there'd definitely be a market for competent creators of these ads.

Apple’s ads are quite costly – they will probably never serve the most ads or get the most eyeballs but they will probably have high revenue.

Kind of like everything else they do.

Why not just revise the developer agreement to squeeze out AdSense/AdMob? They kinda did already (with the 3rd party analytics), but I'm sure there's more they could do.

Note that these appear to be premium, highly visual, highly interactive ads - the territory previously served by Flash. Now they stand to profit nicely from a native ad ecosystem. Could this have been in the works all along? Does this partly explain the Flash strategy?

How does he get to half of the U.S. market while just being on one carrier. Unless he is planning on allowing the phone on Verizon I'm not sure how that math works. Maybe he is..

The idea, it seems, is to get half of the spending, by providing more value per view, as well as mandating both a minimum level of quality of advertisements (I recall hearing that Apple's design team was doing the ads for the first batch of companies on iAd) and implicitly supporting them by allowing them on the platform.

What is the state of the tech world when the CEO of the highest valued tech company today, talks about advertising at a developer conference ?

Considering that another very large tech company owes its valuation to an ad driven business model, I'd say its not a huge surprise to anybody.

Does the other 'very large tech company' do this at their developer conferences ?

http://code.google.com/events/io/2010/schedule.html

Have a look at the program guide and let me know ...

Yes, mobile ads were discussed during the Android keynote.

The state of the software tech world according to a skeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeon BOFH who is definitely buying iPhone 4:

Software is mostly on cruise control today, and much like pop-culture endless eating itself, dying, and shiting itself forth again, software is fast converging into a bland, daytime TV amalgam of Facebook-Apple-Amazon-Google. (Or as 4chan'ers will call this new multi-corporate-entity: "new FAAG".)

Exciting!! The kind of software just around the corner makes you want to nerd rage, amirite? I mean, can you imagine, by 2020, we will still be writing HTML, CSS, JS, arguing about browser standards and Canvas2, while struggling against the Telco's crippled, quicksand-slow network speed, and juggling an ever changing incestuous brood of gatekeepers who hoard our data to scrape pennies from the advertising equivalent of the world's biggest penny cup. 2020, welcome to 2010. "Innovation" is the biggest weasel word in software.

Most new software is going to be an incrementally trivial variant of something you've already seen, probably decades ago. And it's all because we've nearly reached the inflection point of "peak hardware." Like the prescient chief of the US patent office back in the 1800's, I will now modestly paraphrase and state that 99% of all software that could ever be invented has already been invented. The rest is just "filling in holes." Caveat #1: that hardware doesn't break out and improve at a faster rate than software for the next few decades. Caveat #2: it may not even be possible to quantify "the rate of improvement of software compared to hardware."

You want to get me excited by some software? Show it to me but running orders of magnitude faster than everything before it could. All that matters at this point is better hardware because the software doesn't have much more room to radically change.

I know that 'round these parts daring to ask "what's in the software startup kool-aid?" gets down votes. But I don't really care about becoming the biggest, most profitable ad-spammer in the world, nor video chat, nor overvalued and pointless web startups, nor browser animation recreating the state of the art from the 80's, nor the ability to play CD-ROM multimedia content, or Apps, or whatever you want to call them this decade. (This is the part where you get off my lawn.)

The only thing that can prevent software from ending up in its own post-apocalyptic "Nuclear Winter" of suburban doom is a big bump up on the hardware:

a) better batteries.

b) more ram.

c) faster CPU.

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