Taboola + Apple News
Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios.
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The deal is also a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation — one that, if Apple doesn’t build internally, will need to be outsourced.
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This isn’t the first time Apple has worked with a third party on ad sales. Before working with Taboola, Apple had an exclusive deal with NBCUniversal to sell ads for Apple Stocks and Apple News.
I’ve been a happy Apple One customer. It made perfect sense to sign up for the package considering I was paying for Apple TV+, Apple Music, and iCloud storage. For an extra couple of dollars, I could get Apple News+, so I thought why not. That ended today when I learned that Apple had struck a deal with Taboola, a company known for serving low-quality ads next to web content. I decided to cut bait.
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If you look at Facebook’s ARPU in the U.S. and Canada, it is hovering around $54 or about $4.50 a month. There’s no way Apple News and Stocks are as good at monetizing from advertising or have the market power to extract better advertising pricing. If they did, then they wouldn’t be partnering with Taboola. It makes more sense for Apple to charge a few dollars more from its Apple News customers and eschew all advertising. That’s almost a better business decision and actually maintains brand integrity.
Then again, services revenue seems to have compelled Apple to do lots of things which previously felt wrong. It has a credit card with interest rates currently between 19.24% and 29.49%. It aggressively advertises its services in its operating systems to the detriment of users’ experiences.
These moves may not feel like they fit Apple’s brand if your impression of it was formed more than ten years ago. There is no use protesting that they are out of character, however, when priorities like these feel like they represent today’s Apple.
The typical Taboola ads you see around the web – “chumbox” as they’re called, which is just a great way to frame them – are terrible. They’re visual reminders of the worst tendencies of humanity. They’re clickbait, productized to the max. So yes, it is shocking that Apple would partner with the company responsible for spreading these around the web.
But it’s also quite possible that Apple is going to heavily restrict the kind of ads Taboola can serve up.
Apple News as a whole (both the free version and the “plus” version) just isn’t very good and hasn’t been for awhile. Between repeatedly surfacing content from topics and news organizations I’ve blocked and already tacky ads, it’s not a place I really want to spend time or spend money on.
If you told me that the ads in Apple News have been sold by Taboola for the last few years, I’d have said, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because the ads in Apple News — at least the ones I see — already look like chumbox Taboola ads. Even worse, they’re incredibly repetitious.
A service you pay for should have no ads let alone the shitty ads Apple adds to the News app.
Previously:
- Apple News You Can’t Use
- Ads in the Windows 11 Start Menu and in iOS
- iOS Announcements and Offers
- App Store Ads in Today and App Pages
- Apple Is Building a Demand-side Platform
- The Apple Services Experience Is Not Good Enough
- Apple Business Model: A Naive Nostalgic Look
- The Paywalled Garden: iOS Is Adware
Update (2024-09-10): Kirk McElhearn:
I’ve been using Apple News since its launch as one of my news sources, but as the service has grown, it has enshittified. I’m currently using a free trial of Apple News+, which I earned after my last iPad purchase. I won’t be extending the free trial, because, frankly, Apple News sucks.
Here’s one example; a screenshot from an article in The Atlantic, an Apple News+ title.
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It is insulting that for a paid service, in a somewhat prestigious publication like The Atlantic, Apple shows ads of this type. I don’t even see how Apple can defend these as appropriate ads for this paid platform. The article I was reading, entitled AI Cheating Is Getting Worse, has a total of five chumboxes. Four paragraphs, then a chumbox. After that, there’s a chumbox after every three paragraphs.
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"The deal is also a recognition from Apple that growing its ad business will require a serious sales operation"
Seems more like a tacit admission that there just isn't much demand for ads out there, so they're going with chum to fill space.
This is just grand! I'm shocked Mr Gruber doesn't have a better spin while Apple is playing 4D chess here with this masterful partnership.
I tried to find a video of when Jobs introduced Apple Ads. This is as close as I got:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlSdZ6vMWI8
