Exclusive: Apple Halves Minimum iAd Buy

Apple set the bar high for its debut in the mobile advertising business, demanding a minimum spend of $1 million from advertisers looking to hawk their wares from its iAd platform.

It was a daunting premium for a nascent system, and one that limited its appeal to big-name companies. Now, with the first run of iAd campaigns ended, Apple is lowering its minimum spend to appeal to smaller-scale advertisers who originally couldn’t afford the platform.

It’s cutting it in half.

Apple confirms that the new entry point is $500,000, a significantly smaller commitment, particularly for smaller brands and agencies that are creating and producing their own iAds.

“This new minimum buy is a great step forward and a necessary one, I think,” Mark Read, CEO of WPP Digital, the digital arm of global ad giant WPP, told me. “Lowering the minimum buy to $500,000 from $1 million will certainly make the platform more appealing.”

Which is exactly what the platform needs right now. Though Apple claims more than 60 successful brand campaigns for iAds and a 100 percent renewal rate, some developers feel the platform has been slow to gain traction. Evidently fill rates–the percentage of ad inventory actually filled with an ad–declined earlier this year, disappointing some iAd Network developers who were making a killing off the platform (Pinger’s monthly revenues, for example, grew from about $20,000 last summer to nearly $1.5 million in December thanks to iAds).

Presumably, lowering iAds’ million-dollar hurdle will reverse that trend, bringing more brands to the platform, and an increasingly larger portion of their annual ad spend to Apple. Because that’s what Apple’s really gunning for–despite suggestions that it’s looking specifically to commandeer broadcast TV ad budgets.

Said Read, “Apple isn’t necessarily targeting television ad budgets with iAds, but brand budgets. It’s after whatever portion of the Net advertising budget that it can get by offering access to this developing mobile demographic, which is a pretty valuable one.”

$340AShareMakesMeAngry>8-#

I guess even Apple has to adjust prices if sales are down. I hope this price drop does the trick.
http://www.cyber-punk.cz.cc/ ShadowRunner

Fighting over pennies is sooooo bad for tech. another good case for open-source.
Anonymous

Looks like Apple is getting ready to turn up the heat!

http://www.privacy-resources.at.tc
http://bayansell.com/ BayanSell

This is just smart pricing. Charge high prices at launch to keep up with the demand. The same thing happens to all products.
Anonymous

Open source is good if you are only aiming for pennies, but is hardly going to cut it when your business is copying Apple, ala Google, Microsoft, etc…

And Google is no more open than Apple or Microsoft. And, of course, Apple has contributed much more than either Google or Microsoft, BTW. Firewire (USB), Webkit, etc… are two good ones they openly contributed.

Of course, Google and MSFT will be all to happy to copy virtually all of the obvious parts of the Mac or iPhone and pretend they did something ‘innovative’, but you know better than that, right?
GeorgeS

It follows Apple’s usual strategy. When they introduce something new, thy try to get it right–the first time. With gadgets, that often means keeping it simple–leaving out “features”–e.g., an FM radio for the iPod. (Jobs has said that the real challenge in design is knowing what to leave out.)

With iAd, by setting the bar high at first, Apple increased the likelihood that the first round of ads would be well-done.
http://www.topcentech.com/ topcentech

thanks for this article
http://www.cyber-punk.cz.cc/ ShadowRunner

Actually apple is more adept at stealing and locking up opensource (ios & OsX are based on bsd code) And microShaft gives lip service to the opensource community but has yet to deliver in a meaningful way.
and before an M$ fanboy starts to speak of all the code contributed I will say it was mostly meaningless code. now if they wanted to make a difference they would GPL their 9X legacy code since they choose not to support it. oh and watson who beat the tar out of 2 former champions ran linux baby. and at last count 60% of the net sits on opensource software, almost 80% is something in the nix family. and yes google is more open iphone, you can customize an android phone and make it do whatever you want it to do. no walled garden there.
Anonymous

Except the nerd-concept of the “walled garden” is rather specious. Maybe you have a dog, or other creatures you want kept in or out of the mythical “garden”!

I mean you are no doubt a really smart coder with skillz. You know you can jailbreak with like one command, practically, and drop the proverbial “wall”.

Apples ECOSYSTEM and support are features that simply dont exist on also ran copies of iphone, such as Android, true. But the device itself also puts Android running devices to shame in design, features (e.g. RAM), resale value, etc… Unless you like the funky shapes, lack of accessories and apps. Some of the screens are larger, even tho they are much lower resolution than the nearly one year old iphone4.

Exclusive: Apple Halves Minimum iAd Buy

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