Apple Strikes Deal With Taboola to Sell Ads for Apple News

Friday, 19 July 2024

Sara Fischer, reporting this week for Axios:

Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. The deal provides new validation for Taboola’s business, which has ballooned to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue as of 2023. [...]

As an authorized advertising reseller for Apple News and Apple Stocks, Taboola will power native advertising placements within those two apps in every market available. [...]

Most people know Taboola as the company responsible for placing chumbox ads at the bottom of many news stories online.

Eric Seufert, on Threads:

Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective, assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.

They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s the point.

Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace ads personalization.

If you told me that the ads in Apple News have been sold by Taboola for the last few years, I’d have said, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because the ads in Apple News — at least the ones I see1 — already look like chumbox Taboola ads. Even worse, they’re incredibly repetitious.

Here’s an example. Today a friend sent me a link to an article at Rolling Stone. The article was behind a paywall on their website, so I used the Share sheet to open the article in Apple News. (Rolling Stone is one of many publications included with a News+ subscription, which I get through the Apple One bundle. This is pretty much the only reason I use Apple News — for reading stories that are paywalled on the web.) I made screen recordings showing me scrolling through the entire article, twice. I got different ads each time, but on both page loads there was at least one ad shown four times, and at least one other ad shown twice. That’s a lot of ads, and a lot of repetition.

And, by sheer coincidence, on the web Rolling Stone is a Taboola partner. Here’s a screenshot of the box of “suggested stories” chum that Taboola offered. It’s pretty much exactly the sort of stuff I see in the ads on Apple News.

So while I don’t think it’s good news that Apple is partnering with Taboola, I don’t expect it to make any discernible difference in the ad quality or frequency. Maybe it will improve the variety?

  1. And, for what it’s worth (which might not be much), I do have “Personalized Ads” enabled in Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising. So I should be seeing the best ads Apple has to offer in Apple News. The half-dozen ads for Bellagio and MGM Resorts that you see in the second screen recording I made of that Rolling Stone article do seem personalized — I’ve read a couple of articles this week commemorating the closing of The Mirage. Bellagio is effectively Mirage 2.0 (and Wynn and Encore are 3.0). ↩︎