Yesterday, Apple held their iPhone developer preview event and announced the 4.0 iPhone OS. I summarized the key points in bullet point fashion at RustyBrick, my corporate web site but now you can watch the keynote on Apple.com if you missed it. But one of the big announcements that impacts Google is that Apple will be starting an ad company named iAd.
iAd competed directly with the already popular beta version of Google AdSense for Mobile Applications. I can tell you first hand, as a developer, that AdSense in mobile apps works incredibly well for monetizing these free apps. That is why Apple wants a piece of it with iAd. The funny part is that Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO made a comment that Google tried to prevent them from getting into the market by buying AdMob, so Apple had to buy another company. In any event, Appel describes iAd as:
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.
The demo at the yesterday's keynote was pretty impressive and being that Apple holds the keys to all the apps - I am sure they will make it incredibly easy to add to apps. So we will see how this impacts Google's mobile ad product.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
