Apple Strangling iAds?

If this article is to be believed, Apple may charge advertisers $1 million to be an advertiser on iAd, and if you want to be one of the first, it might be $10 million. So, Apple, I guess you only want big advertisers. I was expecting something more like Google, where anyone can buy search terms to place their ads alongside. This is a completely different program... and it does make you wonder how much ability an advertiser will get to determine where their ads appear. What if your ad appears in a lousy app, or an off-color one?

Right now, since Apple has released very little information about this plan, I guess we have no answers. But the devil really is in the details. Do advertisers get to choose what apps their ads appear in? Do app producers get to choose what ads appear in their apps? How does an advertiser control their spending (do you set a price level, a number of impressions, what)? Do you pay for every time the ad appears, or just every time someone clicks on the ad?

From this article it sounds like Apple is setting up something more akin to traditional magazine advertising than the very individualized Google model. I was hoping Apple was planning to democratize advertising on mobile platforms the way Google did for desktops. I'm sure Google gets the bulk of its revenue from a very large number of small advertisers, rather than a few big advertisers. You can get started with Google for next to nothing, and scale up if your Google ads prove effective. Will Apple offer something like that? I hope so, but this article does not make me optimistic.