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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."
Getting iADBlock on the Appstore.
I hate advertising so much I have stopped watching live television. However, IAd is no more intrusive than any other form of mobile advertising you might have encountered in the past (i.e. browsing nearly any website). Additionally, this is a service that is packaged with mostly free software that you download voluntarily, so it's only as intrusive as you allow it to be.
WTF are you talking about? There is certainly adware that runs on windows as well as on Mac OS. It's just a normal part of the [proprietary] software ecosystem, like shareware or trialware. Usually the advantage of adware is you can use the software while enduring the ad or pay money for the ad-free version.
This business of Apple being constantly praised uncritically or damned irrationally on slashdot is getting really old. Steve Jobs is neither your saviour nor the antichrist, and iAd is just a way for developers to offer an ad-sponsored software option.
Caveat Utilitor
So then don't use the free app and stop whining about not getting something for nothing.
Exactly the point. This gets more "free" apps on the store while getting the developers (and apple, of course) some cash. Personally, I'm fine with it. I already pay for the best apps I use, but always look for free "utility" apps to use once or twice a year. As I understand it, the ad will be a small click-though type, where the banner is a low bandwidth type which will load some more advanced (and b/w intensive) ad on clicking.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
One might argue that Steve Jobs is no more a threat to "free software" than Richard Stallman. Stallman believes that the GPL is superior to, say, the BSD or MIT licenses; a stance that is primarily idealogical. The GPL is not as free as the BSD license, but that's OK. Some people like it better that way. You have the choice. If you look at it from a certain, limited point of view, the GPL can be seen as the "iPhone" of the open source licenses in that it restricts what you can, and cannot do, with the software.
If you take everything coming from Apple as coming from Steve Jobs himself, then we could just as easily point to liberally-licensed projects like WebKit (LGPL), LLVM (NCSA License) and CLANG (BSD), libdispatch (Apache) or launchd (Apache) as arguments against your assertion that Jobs is against free software. Even the Apple Public Source License is certified by the FSF as a true Open Source license.
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.
What restricts a developer from including iAds in their paid-for application?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
iAds are a little different, Apple specifies the dimensions. For example in landscape orientation a 480x32 pixel strip across the entire screen is reserved. In Perpenso Calc we sandwich this between the numeric display and the segmented control that lets you select scientific, hex or bill mode. So it is out of the way during normal use. However when you click on an ad Apple puts up a full screen window over your app to display an ad with pretty rich content. Dismiss this ad and you are still in the app. The ad in your app is not a simple link that takes you out of your app and delivers you to some web page.
While the guy you replied to is clearly a troll, after reading this thread, I can't help but notice something interesting.
Blocking ads in an ad-supported app (on any platform) is not at all different from blocking ads in a web site. The latter has been described numerous times on Slashdot, and while there were always some voices in support of "ad blocking is stealing!" POV, they were always few and far between (and quickly downmodded), and the mainstream opinion was always strongly "it's my box, and I can read websites the way I like on it, including suppressing ads".
And yet, in this thread, there is a huge number of responses that basically equate ad blocking on iPhone to stealing...