Apple Plans More Ads for Maps, Books, Podcasts, and Even Apple TV+: Report

In this week’s edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported that Apple plans on significantly expanding its advertisement business.

What you’re about to read may seem a bit ironic: Apple is going to, over time, significantly expand its own advertising business.

Apple already serves ads in its stock News and Stocks apps, along with the App Store, on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Just last month, Apple added more advertisements to the App Store.

Gurman believes the most likely candidate for Apple to bring advertisements to next would be Maps, followed by digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. He added that Apple TV+ could become a possibility in the future as well, going the way of Netflix and Disney+.

According to Gurman, the company wants to gradually bring ads to even more areas on its devices.  Last year, Apple started rolling out the App Tracking Transparency feature to discourage third parties from tracking users across apps that aren’t their own without the user’s consent. Advertisers use tracking data to serve personalized, targeted ads to users.

App Tracking Transparency has ended up making the competition’s advertising strategies for iOS much less effective. As a result, many businesses have chosen to jump ship from competitors like Facebook and Snapchat and go straight to the source for their iOS advertisements.

Apple might be looking to take advantage of the gap the company itself has created in its ecosystem. Gurman noted that Apple’s expansion plans may pose some privacy concerns.

The company’s advertising system uses data from its other services and your Apple account to decide which ads to serve. That doesn’t feel like a privacy-first policy.

You can disable the ad personalization feature (look under Apple Advertising in the settings app’s Privacy & Security menu), and the company says that 78% of iOS 15 users have done just that. But the system will still leverage data like the identity of your carrier, device type and what you read.

Last week, Gurman detailed what he expects from Apple’s upcoming September event. He also reported that iPadOS 16 has been pushed back to October.

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