Apple Expanding its Digital Ads Team, Seeking 200+ Hires: Report

Apple is currently looking to almost double its advertising team as the tech giant makes a play for a larger chunk of the $400 billion USD global digital ads market — reports the Financial Times.

The move comes less than 18 months after Apple introduced major privacy changes under the App Tracking Transparency framework in iOS 14 that made it harder for rival advertisers to serve targeted ads to its users.

App Tracking Transparency requires companies to ask iPhone users for consent before tracking them across other apps. Tracking data is generally used to serve tailored, more focused ads to users. With Apple users overwhelmingly opting out of third-party tracking, other advertisers lost their most coveted targeting vector.

App Tracking Transparency has chipped away at competitors’ ad revenue, with Facebook claiming it will lose around $10 billion USD per year as a result. Meanwhile, Apple’s own ads business has flourished and more advertisers are switching over to Apple to better cater to their iOS audiences.

Apple recently injected more ad placements into the App Store. According to a recent report, the iPhone maker also plans to bring ads to News+, Maps, Books, Podcasts, and even Apple TV+ to cash in on the opportunity. This latest discovery of its hiring spree seemingly corroborates the latter report by Bloomberg.

To expand its advertising business, Apple’s going to have to expand the team working on it as well. According to the Financial Times, Apple currently employs about 250 people on its ad platforms team. The company currently has open job listings on its Careers website for another 216 employees who will support its “incredibly fast-growing” ads business.

Apple disputed the publication’s numbers but declined to elaborate.

According to research group Evercore ISI, Apple’s ads business has gone from just a few hundred million dollars of revenue in the late 2010s to about $5 billion this year. What’s more, experts believe Apple could do $30 billion in ad revenue within four years.

Apple’s advertising business is still but a shadow of Google’s or Facebook’s, which posted revenues of $209 billion and $115 billion, respectively, in 2021. However, Apple is quickly capturing more and more of the market. Both critics and rivals are concerned that Apple is doing so by leveraging the unfair advantage of controlling a platform of over one billion devices that ads are served to.