In an effort to increase its revenues from advertising across its services, Apple is ramping up its in-house advertisement efforts. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who tracks Apple’s business activities, reports that the company is looking to boost its advertisement revenues division. It’s not entirely clear how this would work at the moment, but it would likely result in more advertisements across more Apple apps and services.
Ads have had a mixed relationship with the Cupertino company. Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former chief executive, introduced iAd, a third-party advertising division similar to Google Ads, in 2010. It was in 2016, however, that Apple shut down its third-party ads division internally, as it shifted more resources to hardware-driven revenues, whereas its iAd service did not take off.
Recently, Apple introduced a feature called App Tracking Transparency (ATT). ATT prevents third-party ads from effectively working since it prevents services from tracking you across apps and the internet. As a result, Meta (than Facebook) ran full-page advertisements in newspapers and warned that Apple’s move would destroy the earnings and revenue models of thousands of small businesses worldwide.
According to Mark Zuckerberg, thousands of small businesses used user tracking to serve effective ads. According to Facebook, taking away the usage tracking feature has been detrimental to third-party ads. As a result of Apple’s ATT feature, Facebook itself has lost billions of dollars in ad-supported revenues.
