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In the aggressive pursuit of expanding ad revenue, Apple is gambling with one of its core values: great products.
I remember a moment several years ago when I saw an article tearing into Microsoft for embedding ads in their weather app on Windows. I remember feeling appalled and perplexed why a billion-dollar giant tech company would willingly cheapen their flagship product merely for a bit more money. I felt self-righteous at the time because I knew the competing platform I used, Apple, would never tarnish their computing experience with ads. Their reputation and company values were intangibles that far exceeded the revenue the company stood to make by plastering its OS with ads.
Fast forward to 2022, and I feel like the wool has been pulled over my eyes. Apple has slowly expanded the reach of ads across their platforms over the past several years, including now showing ads before their TV+ shows, allowing ads to be absolutely riddled throughout the News+ app (including videos), showing ads in the stocks app, promoting their services in the iOS settings app, not reprimanding third-party developers from using push notifications to display ads, showing ads in App Store search results, and most recently, showing ads on the front page and EVERY SINGLE app product page of the App Store. What's more, there are rumours of more ads rolling out into Maps and Podcasts in the future.
Apple took a lot of heat last week after the rollout of iOS 16.1 introduced ads on every app product page. It was bad enough that developer's product pages now had ads on them because some developers saw these pages, rightly or wrongly, as their sacred plot of land inside the heavily controlled App Store. And it got worse because ads shown on these pages could be utterly irrelevant to the app category because it was the advertiser's choice, not the developers, to select where ads should appear.
But the most upsetting outcome of the rollout was that ad results quickly became inappropriate and dangerous. The majority of ads shown, regardless of category, were for casino and slot-machine-type apps, including being featured on pages for apps supporting people in mental health and addiction recovery. But it went further than that; apps for improving your marriage featured ads for adult dating, while other pages featured ads for adult video chat. In a recent episode of The Talk Show, John Gruber nailed the sentiment when he remarked that the scenario that played out last week would feel farfetched even if you were trying to parody this behaviour from an evil corporation in a movie or TV show.
Now to Apple's credit, within 24 hours, casino-type ads were paused, and some app categories had ads suspended, presumably while Apple rejigs the system. But there's still every sign that Apple intends to re-rollout ads, albeit 'better ads,' into the App Store in the near future. This debacle has delayed, rather than dissuaded, the company from aggressively pursuing expanding ads across more of its products & platforms.
Growth at Any Cost
In the past half-decade, Apple has focused on aggressively growing its service revenue. Originally services consisted of iCloud storage in 2011, which expanded to Apple Music in 2015, Apple Arcade, TV+, & News+ in 2019, & most recently, Apple Fitness in 2020. Services are an ideal retention strategy that keeps people connected to the ecosystem while providing Apple with a continuous source of revenue amongst people's intermittent iPad, Mac, and iPhone purchases. They can also become hardware agnostic, as some of Apple's services can now be accessed on many Android and Microsoft devices, increasing the pool of potential customers.
But along with these service offerings, Apple appears poised to continue expanding its ad revenue. Rumours suggest that Apple intends to increase their annual ad revenue from the current $4 billion per year to 'double digits'.
What angers me about this trend is that many of the experiences I treasure are being devalued in order to prioritize more revenue. When I have to sift through a dozen ads to read a single News+ article, you know what I do? I stop using it. When I have to page through giant obnoxious ads for, of all things, cheese jingles in the stocks app, you know what I do? I stop using it. And when I constantly have to dismiss and scroll past ads to get to the content I want, you know what I do? I stop using it. And I stop using it because I no longer feel like I'm in a valued relationship with the company. Instead, I feel like a means to an end, a set of eyeballs that can be squeezed for an extra nickel of ad revenue each month. I willingly paid a tremendous amount for the hardware, and I choose to pay nearly $500 annually to access Apple services, but seeing ads being further promulgated across the software feels, well, gross.
The other thing that frightens me is that I don't see anything suggesting this is stopping anytime soon. If ads are eventually incorporated into Maps, they'll likely slide into Podcasts. And once they're in Podcasts, maybe Music, Books, or even, gasp, Weather!* Previously I knew Apple would never compromise customer experience in this way; now, I'm not so sure.
In the pursuit of more ad revenue, Apple has inflicted damage to one of its core values. I'm sorry Apple, but great products don't come plastered with giant ads for cheese jingles and hookup apps. There's a lot of goodwill to be lost in the relentless pursuit of more ad revenue, and I just hope the company I've long admired realizes that before it's too late.
*After finishing this piece, I saw the article that Apple, in iOS 16.2, is moving ahead with putting weather-related News+ blocks inside the weather app. It’s not ads, but with no current option to disable the feature, I’m not a fan of this implementation either.
