Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Apple’s Iphone developer agreement changed

Apple recently changed their developer agreement which it appears to prohibit certain third-party ad agencies from collecting critical usage data from iphone applications (including ipad or ipod touch).

This does not sound really important but it is. It is extremely important for google, which acquired recently adMobs which does 30% of online advertising revenue through iphone devices.


Small one person developers won’t care so much because they don’t care really how to geo target their ads if they even can sell them to big companies like P&G or Unilever.

But advertising agencies do care extremely. In order to target the right people and optimize advertising campaigns their clients like P&G want to have the ability to see what is exactly going on with their marketing money. And it is understood able.

The only way Ad Agencies can provide this, is using the Apple iAD program. This means agencies have to book at least $250K to be a part of iAd. Plus Apple is charging 4 to 10 times more for ads than comparable mobile ad deals. Not only this, Apple we keep a share of 40% of the ads. Either the margin for ad agencies will go extremely down, or they have to raise the charge to their advertisers.

This will open the question will ad agency even go into iphone advertising or skip it.
Especially that apple said they already sold $60Mio in ads to big advertiser, this is not much but a sign that Apple will approach them direct instead of letting Ad agencies work on this.
I get the feeling that Apple is starting a battle with google which can hurt much more companies than google.

I understand that Apple wants to promote their own ad system, but there must be an acceptable threshold which allows apple to offer a perfect advertising tool but at the same time keep other not so big companies alive.

Till July is still a few weeks, let us see how significant this developer agreement change will be.

1 comment:

  1. Great post on Apple Iphone Developer Agreement. These news is for mainly for Developer which required on documentation of application which he/she has been created.

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