Hello everyone and welcome to ZD Tech, ZDNet’s daily editorial podcast. I am Rock and today I’m going to tell you why Apple’s Latest Idea for Making New Profits You Might Not Like.
It’s well known, Apple has the art of taking advantage of its closed ecosystem to get out of the margins for the less comfortable! If the sale of products stamped with the apple brand still gives it the majority of its profits, the Californian giant nevertheless plays on several fronts thanks to a service activity no less generous for its finances. During the second quarter of 2022, ending on June 25, the services thus brought in no less than $ 19.6 billion to Apple, against the trifle of $ 63.4 billion for the sale of its MacBooks, iPhones and other iPads. .
The staff of Apple is far, very far from wanting to stop in such a good way. To make its income grow even more, the management of the Californian giant now intends to significantly develop an activity that is still relatively little exploited, namely online advertising. According to journalist Mark Gurman, an Apple observer on behalf of Bloomberg, Apple aims to place more advertising on iPhones, through its native App Store, Maps, Books and Podcasts applications.
The threat hangs
The goal would be to accelerate the current pace of growth in Apple’s advertising business, which currently generates $4 billion a year to double digits. Since July, the American giant’s App Store already has more advertising spaces.
While advertising was previously limited to search results, ads now line the homepage. New ad placements are also expected to appear in the News, Apple Store, and Stocks apps with iOS 16, launching this fall.
At the same time, the brand’s streaming service, Apple TV+, could also be sponsored by advertising in order to display a lower price. Apple would thus join the other streaming giants who have created subscriptions with advertising, such as Netflix and Disney+. Remains a downside: namely the intrinsic philosophy of Apple and its CEO Tim Cook, long opposed to the internet sponsored by advertising. In 2018, the leader criticized Facebook, Google and other digital giants for becoming “industrial data complexes” targeting users with military precision. To see if this position will still be displayed so clearly in the coming months on the side of the apple brand.