What Can iAds Do For You Today?
When the potential of Google AdSense became clear, it was a seminal moment. It was a revolution in entrepreneurial opportunity. You didn’t need to be a programmer, a computer whiz or a venture capitalist to make money out of the Internet. All you needed to do was identify one thing that you knew a lot about, write about it, surround your content with ads and if you could bring in the traffic, you had a new business.
The launch of Apple’s iAds program isn’t on the same scale.
Creating an app isn’t difficult. But it’s not as straightforward as launching a website is today. While you can have a blog up and running in minutes, it will take much longer than that to turn an idea for an iPhone app into a working product. And then you’ll have to wait for Apple to approve it.
If you’re a programmer, that process means time. If you’re not a programmer, it means hiring one and investing in your idea.
But it doesn’t have to be difficult and the investment doesn’t have to be a huge amount of money. Many of the apps in the App Store were created by teams of one writing code in their spare time or paying a freelance programmer to play with Apple’s Development Kit.
iAds then, a network of engaging new ads that will run at the bottom of iPhone apps, isn’t going to democratize business in the same way that AdSense has done. But is going to have some important effects on the app industry.
The apps themselves may change. Although users can interact with the new ads without closing their apps, gamers stuck in a shoot-out or racing around a track aren’t going to take their eyes off the enemy to click an ad. The most clicks then — and iAds are expected to pay on both a CPM and a CPC basis — will come on apps that run at a slower pace. It’s possible then that developers will start to think more about information apps, especially those that offer local news and reviews (and which can generate attractive local ads) and less about complex action games.
We’ll also see a change to the economics. Free apps have never been able to pay their way with advertising so developers have used them instead as lite, free samples. The ad revenues alone just haven’t been high enough to make them work. It’s possible that that will change but it’s not certain. What is certain though is that those free apps will suddenly start to contribute a lot more income to developers creating even more incentive for people with app ideas to start looking for freelance programmers.
This might not be a revolutionary moment, but it is change — and it’s very exciting.
