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What Developers Think About Apple's iAd
Nemilar writes "It's been about a week since Apple rolled out its new advertising platform, and developers of iPhone apps are watching the earliest returns to see how much money they can expect to make from these ads. One developer reported Thursday that he earned $1,400 in one day for his flashlight app. The amount iAds pay is 'a high number when you get it, but you don't get it very often,' said Dave Yonamine, the director of marketing at MobilityWare. The article discusses revenue potential in relation to the only other mobile ads platform, AdMob for Android, and claims that iAd paid as much as $148 for the same number of ads as $1 on AdMob; but this extreme ratio is likely to erode as the novelty wears off."
http://online.wsj.com/media/iad_D_20100709194420.jpg
Are you seriously going to claim that developers can't put ads on Android? At least the ads are limited in real estate and they dont do much of anything unless you opt to click on them. No ad is great, but they can make an an otherwise pay app, free for use.
I should also point out that the ads are only in third party software. There is no outcry because MS doesn't put ads in Windows, and Apple doesn't put ads in iOS. It leaves that up to the developer to find the balance point between 'irritating as hell', and 'acceptable'.
Your post just shows you have no idea what iAd is. You don't get ads while using the phone. Some free app developers can decide to put ads in their apps, you can chose not to use those apps if you want to. There have already been apps with ads for a while, this is nothing new.
Yeah, they do it this way because they can't just kill that application ;) Unlike Android when you leave an application it dies in iOS. Yes they added "multitasking server/client support" but how many apps already do this? Don't confuse elegance with pure necessity.
iAds require iOS 4. In iOS 4 the app does not die when closed, it moves to an in-memory background state. Clicking on its icon moves it from background to foreground, it does not relaunch the app. Even apps built for older versions of iOS do this.
So I think we can chalk this up to elegance, or better yet effectiveness. The "normal" ad you see in your app is like an icon that launches the "real" full screen ad. Full screen with rich content allows advertisers to do much more compelling things.