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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

> But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand.

They have ads in the App Store already. Search ads are probably the one kind of ad they could make work, since you can sell keywords without tracking and profiling your users.

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Keyword ads are significantly less likely to be clicked on than tracked advertising, because keyword ads are less targeted. This is fact confirmed by Google’s and Facebook’s success at selling targeted advertising. If Apple sells keyword ads their search product will never be able to generate as much revenue as Google because the ads will be less effective.

I thought it was the other way around? Keyword ads on search results are by far the most profitable since you have intent right there ("what is the best lawn mower"), whereas the vague stalker-ish amazon ads about buying another one of the thing you just bought (or just trying to guess "well homeowners in their 30's might be interested in a lawn mower") have way lower value.

Especially on Google Search results, the top ads for brand names are usually for the first search result anyway and people click on them because they're first, making google lots of "free" money as people have to protect the top spot for their own brand

It's more that some tracking is important to result quality. For example, if I search for "eclipse" on Google, I get 5 results about the IDE, but my wife gets local maps & youtube videos about eclipses.

Parent comment was about Apple not being able to do it because of massive expense, if apple can make any profit that's not true, they don't need to make Google profit. I wonder if they would be able to make enough to cover Googles payment to be the default, though.

There’s ~1 billion Apple products and ~10 billion annually in payment from Google to Apple. Apple would need to make $10/yr per device in order to replace the revenue from Google. That’s a fairly achievable goal.

Of course, there are more complications than that simple figure, but it does provide a order of magnitude estimation.

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