Apple’s iAd platform gives casino affiliates a shot at getting their message to high value, free spending iOS users. Not only that, the ads you can develop on iAd have the potential to be some of the most robust and original ads on any mobile network.
Sounds good, right? In many ways, the iAd platform has always had the potential to be the next big thing in the mobile advertising space, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. Apple’s need for complete control over developers, combined with its platinum pricing structure, means that it’s probably not a great fit for most casino affiliates.
Here are a few facts you should know about iAds before you make the leap into the iOS advertising space.
One of the iAd network’s biggest draws is that it provides access to a pretty high worth audience.
Though Apple users are vastly outnumbered by Android users, their collective net worth is much higher and they’re much more likely to use their phones for commerce. A recent study by Arbitron found that iPhone users were 54% more likely to use mobile commerce apps than their Android counterparts.
Accessing these well-heeled end users does, however, comes at a very high price, the minimum iAd buy is still a sky high $100,000. That’s well beyond what most affiliates could ever hope to pay, but just a fraction of the $1 million minimum buy when the network first launched.
Though their wallets are fat, iPhone users offer a pretty limited audience that may not be big enough to justify that sky-high buy-in price, even for high-end affiliates.
You might think that for that kind of pricing you’d have access to some pretty robust metrics, but that’s not the case.
By most accounts, Apple’s well-intentioned desire to protect end user privacy leaves advertisers with almost nothing in the way of metrics. Those limited metrics make it a tough sell at any price. Though Apple has taken a few steps to improve this situation, they’ve been minor and are cloaked under a VIP Program.
At the end of the day, iAd is like most other Apple products. On the one hand it produces good looking, feature rich ads, but serves them up at a very high price, with plenty of restrictions, to a very limited audience.
If you do a little reading on Apple’s iAd platform you’ll quickly get the idea that it’s one of the company’s rare missteps. Apple simply demands too much control, and too much money, for this to be a good fit for casino affiliates.
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