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To the delight of every tech nerd you know, Apple unveiled its latest product lineup yesterday at a live event with enough fanfare to be confused for a royal wedding.
- Four new iPhones, including the iPhone 14, 14 Plus, and new Pro models that run on an advanced chip and feature fancy cameras
- Next-gen Apple Watches, with new temperature sensors (that can, controversially, help track ovulation cycles)
- Souped-up AirPods with better noise cancellation and six hours of listening time per charge
But sleek new gadgets aren’t the only way that Apple’s gearing up to separate you from your hard-earned cash. With smartphone sales plateauing globally, the company is now embracing something it largely used to avoid: selling online advertising.
For now, Apple’s got a much smaller piece of the online ad sales pie than rival platforms Google and Facebook. Recently, though, it’s started carving out a bigger slice: A study released Tuesday by Appsumer found that Apple’s advertiser adoption rate rose four percentage points year over year in Q2, while Facebook’s dropped three percentage points, and Google’s slipped two points.
The company plans to start showing you ads in new places, like Apple Maps, to boost ad revenue—but also it may not exactly be a coincidence that Apple’s gains in the online advertising realm happened in the wake of its App Tracking Transparency update last year. The change limited the user-tracking data Apple made available to advertisers in the name of privacy and made a big dent in the revenues of companies that depend on ad sales like Meta and Snap. Apple is now working to nearly double the size of its advertising staff, per the Financial Times, leaving it poised to benefit from the new landscape it created.
Apple claims its own ad business is different from the others. So far, it is: Apple doesn’t allow ads that target you for visiting a competitor’s website, and it won’t tailor ads to specific individuals. Still, experts told the NYT that Apple might have to start making compromises if it really wants to grow its ad sales.
