Apple iAd: A new frontier in mobile advertising?
Apple recently revealed plans for their new iPhone 4.0 and the “next big thing” that Steve Jobs is so proud of is not the fact that they will be introducing more than 100 new features for the upcoming iPhone but the fact that they will be rolling out iAd – a new form of mobile advertisements. Never mind that the iPhone 4.0 update will also feature 1500 new application programming interfaces (APIs) for developers, because iAd will take center stage and all eyes will be on how Apple actually implements this in the very near future.

This new mobile advertising platform will be compatible with the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch and focuses on the capability to deliver ads hosted directly on Apple’s powerful servers. For the layman, it means that the ads will be in the apps themselves. In fact, Apple has stated that they ads won’t be your usual run-of-the-mill advertisements – they will appear more like apps within an app! These apps are written using the HTML5 standard, so no prizes for guessing that this is a direct refusal of Adobe’s Flash platform!

So how does this benefit everyone?
Consumers: Let’s face it – We all love free iPhone apps but sometimes I really wonder if developers are able to sustain their offerings and continue giving consumers the freebies they crave. With iAd, developers’ costs can easily be converted to ad revenue so that they can continue making free apps for us to enjoy!

Developers: Suddenly, new advertising spaces will exist with the birth of iAd! The opportunities are endless with this one, not to mention the delicious 60% cut of ad revenue generated through countless ads circulating the free apps consumers are downloading and using each day. Some developers will even aim to build ads for third party apps, gaining them even more revenue in the process.

Apple: Unlike the 70-30 cut they impose for their App Store offerings, Apple is now content to earn 40% of all ad revenue. That’s a lot if you take into consideration the length an iPhone user spends using downloaded apps per day (30 minutes), take that amount and you can more or less imagine that the average user will view up to 10 ads a day. With possibly 100 million devices running the iPhone OS in the future, Steve Jobs said: “That’s a billion ad opportunities per day in the iPhone and iPod touch community.”

You do the math.

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