Apple mobile advertising platform: iAd

Posted by Josh on Thursday, April 8th, 2010.

Apple announced that iPhone OS 4 will include iAd, a mobile advertising program tightly integrated with the OS. Very little information is available at this time. To quote Apple:

Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, combines the emotion of TV ads with the interactivity of web ads. When users click on mobile ads they are almost always taken out of their app to a web browser, which loads the advertiser’s webpage. Users must then navigate back to their app, and it is often difficult or impossible to return to exactly where they left. iAd solves this problem by displaying full-screen video and interactive ad content without ever leaving the app, and letting users return to their app anytime they choose. iPhone OS 4 lets developers easily embed iAd opportunities within their apps, and the ads are dynamically and wirelessly delivered to the device. Apple will sell and serve the ads, and developers will receive 60 percent of iAd revenue.

It’s not clear when the new platform will be available, and it sounds as though it will be almost up to developers to provide advertising opportunities within their apps. Will the OS itself or native apps include advertising? We don’t know. It is also not at all clear how advertisers will purchase traffic, though Apple has been pushing every service into the iStore, so we wouldn’t be surprised to find it there eventually.