Apple Stock News
Executives at Apple, Inc. have decided to shut down the company’s fairly brief flirtation with the digital advertising space as of June 30th. For 6 years, Apple attempted to compete with Google’s and Facebook’s advertising platforms with their own platform, called iAd.
In 2010, then-CEO Steve Jobs asserted that Apple would excel in the field, reaching 50% of the mobile advertising market. Six years later, the program is being ended with the company controlling just around 5% of the mobile-display-advertising market.
The biggest contributing factor to the failure of this endeavor is likely the same reason that Apple has such great success on the product side of the company. Apple strictly controls their operating systems, apps and content to the point where the company is essentially isolating themselves from other tech platforms. By maintaining a high-level of control, the company blocks consumers from straying from Apple to other companies for apps and content purchases.
While this technique protects revenue for Apple in terms of products and content, it makes mobile-advertising a difficult endeavor. The isolation of what is called “Apple’s walled garden,” means that advertisers with iAd were able to reach only iOS users who make up just 13.9% of the smartphone market worldwide. In order for iAd to compete with companies like Google, it would have needed to integrate its system in order to be accessible by other ad networks. Apple’s unwillingness to make this change prevented it from getting the exposure that could have kept the program running.