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Exclusive: Taboola to sell ads for Apple
Source: Axios
July 16th, 2024
Summary: As an authorized advertising reseller for Apple, Taboola will power native ads in the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia (note: the word “exclusive” is noticeably absent from the story). Taboola will sell native ad space within the main feeds and articles in both apps. The deal underscores Apple's ad ambitions: Its fast-growing ad business, estimated to reach $10.34B this year, needs a demand accelerant, which will come from Taboola for the time being. Apple previously had an exclusive deal with NBCUniversal to sell ads for Apple Stocks and Apple News (and still lists NBCU as an authorized reseller in the US and the UK). It's another coup for Taboola, a content recommendation / native advertising giant that works with more than 9,000 publishers to sell native ads to more than 18,000 global advertisers to the tune of $1.4B in 2023 revenue. Taboola is also the exclusive native advertising partner for all Yahoo properties as part of an agreement struck in 2022.
In related news, Apple has unveiled a new ad campaign that tells consumers: "Your browsing is being watched."
It outlines how consumers' location data may be tracked without consent on other browsers and touts Safari's privacy protections. Apple also posted "Private Browsing 2.0" on Apple’s WebKit blog that details the company's various privacy features and explains why it opposes Topics API, one of Google's Privacy Sandbox solutions (developed to mimic cookie-based behavioral targeting), saying that it enables privacy-invasive tactics like fingerprinting.
Opinion: Yesterday’s news is emblematic of Apple’s entire strategy: Take a loud swing at the digital advertising industry (especially Google) with the privacy sledgehammer, while quietly adding to a growing war chest of digital advertising products to replace what they’re breaking with said sledgehammer.
It’s a little surprising that Apple is partnering with Taboola, the company widely known for proliferating clickbait-ey “chumbox” advertising across the Internet. We would think that Apple would only introduce advertising when they can have full control over quality and manage the whole operation in-house. Alas, they’ve probably put heavy quality controls in place with Taboola and are giving this a try in the near-term for testing purposes and for a revenue boost. They may even tack on additional partners. Long-term, they’ll probably bring it all in-house.
Apple has been on a privacy crusade for years, and uncoincidentally, their privacy changes always seem to harm ad companies (and open web publishers, and the open internet). Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature, for example, wreaked havoc on ad tech companies, like Criteo. Its App Tracking Transparency feature similarly slammed app publishers; Facebook famously predicted that ATT would dent its bottom line by $10B.
At the same time, Apple is making moves that could position itself as a white knight of sorts for advertisers. It's been investing heavily in its already massive, $10B ad business, including expanding its ad inventory and tech 🔒 to give advertisers addressable ad opportunities within its walled garden, as it continues to wage warfare on addressable advertising across the open web. It's doing all of this without the same level of antitrust scrutiny facing Google and Meta. Post-cookie ID solutions beware: Apple probably isn't going to let up anytime soon.
They know what they're doing. Earlier this week, Apple once again claimed the title of “world’s most valuable company” at a valuation of $3.62T (yup, T for trillion). You don't create the world's most valuable company by altruistically caring about people's privacy. You do it by being ruthlessly strategic.
Think whatever you want about how Apple is going about this, one thing is for certain: Apple CEO Tim Cook is … cookin’.
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