A report from BuzzFeed's John Paczkowski says that Apple is backing away from direct involvement in iAd, the mobile advertising platform it launched back in early 2010.
The company isn't killing the iAd platform, which serves relatively unobtrusive ads that don't force users to leave the app they're already in. Instead, Apple will reportedly disband its own internal sales team and require publishers to sell ads themselves. This is already an option for iAd users, as outlined in this developer document—you keep 100 percent of the revenue from ads you sell yourself, but if Apple sells the ads on your behalf the company takes its standard 30 percent cut. The new system will just get rid of the second option.
iAd had a number of problems, especially early on, that made it unpopular with publishers. Apple initially took a much bigger part in pitching and creating ads than publishers were expecting, and Apple was reluctant to share consumer data that would help advertisers better target their ads. Apple is typically more reluctant to collect user data or share it with third parties than companies like Google. In recent years, Apple has even tried to turn this into a selling point for its products.
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