Apple Needs Some Penicillin
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Om Malik is pulling his money where his mouth is, cancelling his Apple News subscription, and he is not mincing words on the reported Apple/Taboola ad deal:
For over a decade, I have been critical of Taboola (and its one time rival, Outbrain), equating them to the internet’s venereal disease that never goes away. No way I want to pay to let Taboola and its terrible advertising re-enter my information streams.
Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy. As it chases more and more revenue to appease Wall Street, it’s clear Apple will become one of those companies that prioritize shareholders over paying customers and their experience.
The typical Taboola ads you see around the web – "chumbox" as they're called, which is just a great way to frame them – are terrible. They're visual reminders of the worst tendencies of humanity. They're clickbait, productized to the max. So yes, it is shocking that Apple would partner with the company responsible for spreading these around the web.
But it's also quite possible that Apple is going to heavily restrict the kind of ads Taboola can serve up. From Sarah Fischer's report:
Most of those client relationships are direct, which makes it easier for Taboola's team of more than 100 ad moderators to establish certain levels of control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps, Singolda said.
We'd all want to believe that the first spammy/porn-y ad Apple sees reported within Apple News get elevated to the top, quickly. And that may cause them to stop such a relationship. At the same time, Apple has been running ads within News, Stocks, and a handful of other places for a while (largely powered by NBC, but seemingly some that are purely programmatic as well) and many of those are pretty terrible.
Like Om, I pay for Apple News simply by default as a part of 'Apple One'. And I've long been surprised that paying users are shown any ads within News. We all get it for the free version, but why is Apple trying to nickel-and-dime us within a premium service? As I wrote a couple years back:
I actually use the News app quite a bit. I find it to be a good general news catch up tool — sort of like Twitter but minus all the bullshit. And the notifications, when tailored, can be useful. It’s fast and mostly beautiful. Except for the fucking ads. I pay for News+ (because I have the Apple One bundle which includes it) and while I understand to some degree why the magazines included in that bundle still have their brand ads, it’s crazy to me that Apple allows web publishers to inject crappy ads into this experience. And it’s absolutely insane to me that Apple inserts their own junky ads into this experience.
We get it: the publishers both want and likely demanded this. But Apple should have absolutely cut a deal which said that for free Apple News users, inject those ads, we’ll even help you. But for the much smaller subset of paid Apple News users, let’s keep it nice and clean with no ads, and here’s your cut of that subscription income. (Same with the Stocks app, which is the same general concept, but even more ridiculous.)
The answer, of course is obvious. And it's also the way the world is trending again. Netflix blew up the ad-supported media model, but now as they've maxed out on premium, even they're turning to ads to charge growth.
Apple's business, while obviously very different than Netflix's, has some similarities in that their Services business is currently the only real vector for growth. And that includes not only subscriptions like Apple News, but also the various ad businesses. And we're going to see those ramp in the endless quest for revenue. And that's especially true as Apple pushes further into live sports, where advertising remains king.
Anyway, on the surface, yes, this sucks. But you have to also believe that Apple is more than well aware about the brand risk here in going with Taboola if they start injecting the ads as they do elsewhere on the web. At the same time, Apple's current ads aren't exactly the award-winning glossy magazine type that they had once envisioned for content on the iPad. They're still largely click-baity garbage within Apple News and elsewhere. So, we'll see. But I too wish that I didn't have to see any ads as a paying Apple News subscriber. But that ship, sadly, has sailed.