The article is framed as an attack on general digital advertising by small business, which makes little sense given scope of ads available in the ad economy versus from Apple.

The current likely truth (which can change) is buried 3/4 of the way down:

Since upending the online advertising ecosystem, third-party analysts have seen a surge of advertiser activity — and ad dollars — head Apple’s way.

Still framing as “online advertising ecosystem” and “advertiser activity”, but how could all that surge Apple’s way? Reading on …

Last year, for example, one of these reports found that Apple’s Search Ads — which appear at the top of your iPhone screen when you’re looking for a new app to buy in the company’s App Store — were the source of roughly 58% of all iPhone app downloads. A year prior, these same ads were only responsible for 17%. And earlier this summer, one Evercore analyst projected that Apple’s App Store ads could net the company $7.1 billion in revenue by 2025.

The lead sentence frames as if Apple Search Ads are a category of advertising for Apple. In fact, for now, that’s the totality of advertising you can buy from Apple. So this “surge” or transfer is in app discovery.

That ties with the today motivation:

“I think the revenue piece [of the ad market] is less important to Apple than just breaking up Facebook’s total ownership of distribution on mobile,” Seufert said. He pointed out that, for a long time, Facebook dominated the market in driving app installs. One report earlier this year found that about three-quarters of those marketing a mobile app rely on Meta’s ad-tech tools to do so.

Arguably, this could be about gacha gaming, driving “free” games into Facebook feeds to siphon dollars from Facebook moms and Facebook bro “whales” — the Zynga business model — and other “free” apps and games into Facebook feeds to show even more ads to idle clickers. Like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dogemarket/comments/4s2x9x/generate...

“Ads are a revenue opportunity, but, more importantly, they’re a discovery mechanic,” Seufert went on. “And suddenly Facebook was determining which apps got downloaded, not Apple. My sense with all this is that they care about the revenue, but I don’t think that was the primary driver. I think it was about the power.”

This is Apple, so think about “power” as “protect” the consumer aka protect the brand.

Discovery is a nice word for persuade the user to try it just once… and get them to buy in app or click ads forever.

If you frame the ad revenue being decimated as the skim from a Facebook sized slot machine, and the small businesses as folks like that Reddit post, it sounds less heroic to defend.

So what’s Apple up to? Do they want that kind of revenue? How does that work for their brand halo?

Arguably, Apple’s medium term goal — along with short term goal of regaining control of discovery — could be to build a fishing pole to catch the legitimate small business fish caught up in the anti-IAP-exploitation trawler.

Perhaps that’s what’s behind these hires.

Consider the “spikes” in ad cost the article refers to, and think about time people had for games and clickers in the pandemic. Whatever percentage of “app discovery” advertisers aren’t driving ad spend with gambling or addiction revenue, might be better served by a market that screened those out, so the ad cost was not artificially inflated.

Screen app genre and quality (which Apple has a system for already, however imperfect) to take 50% - 75% of the revenue driver out from the ad spend, the prices go down, and small business can now afford ads for quality app discovery.

Apple doesn’t need an advertising business, they need a trusted app platform. This could be a path to course correcting a problem that got literally out of their hands for too long.

In the long run, though, most of my non-tech friends say they actually like relevant ads, particularly the “if this, then that” variety.

If Apple fixes app discovery and builds that into an ethical “acceptable ad discovery” offering with consumer-friendly off switches, they could be imagining it’s a win win win for all three sides of the market: them, legit small advertisers, and these casual consumers.