Report: Apple is investigating in-app ads for Maps, Podcasts, Books and more

According to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, Apple is considering a significant expansion of its advertising business and has already explored adding ads to the iPhone Maps app, as well as other potential expansions on the horizon.

The shift may be driven in part by a recent change in the company’s reporting structure: Gurman wrote in his e-newsletter this week that Apple VP of Advertising Todd Terezi began reporting directly to Apple’s chief of service Eddie Cue a few months ago. He also wrote that Terezi plans to boost Apple’s advertising revenue from $4 billion a year to double-digit billions.

Apple also has an active advertising business in its App Store, allowing developers to pay for high positions in search results listings. And the company recently ventured to advertise on its Apple TV service, but only on Friday Night Baseball.

But, according to Gurman, new frontiers will open up for Apple advertising. For example, in the App Store, ads will extend beyond search results to a custom “Today”homepage and individual app listing pages.

Apple can also advertise in the Podcasts and Books apps, or even expand TV ads beyond sports content with new subscription tiers a la Hulu or Disney+.

Apple has been in the advertising business for a long time, one way or another, but not all of its endeavors in this area have been successful. Back in 2010, Apple introduced iAd, a network that third-party app developers could connect to to display ads in their own apps. Apple ended support for iAd in 2016, and other companies’ ad networks have become popular for iPhone and iPad app developers.

More recently, Apple disrupted the plans of many of these ad networks by introducing an app tracking transparency policy that required all third-party apps to ask users for permission before using certain tracking methods that collect and correlate this data. user data across multiple applications.

Apple’s native apps don’t use these specific tracking methods, so they don’t need to display the same permission prompts.

Neither Apple nor the Bloomberg Newsletter have revealed whether Apple plans to reverse course on this as it expands its own offerings again.