Brace yourself for wildly over-the-top clickbait adverts in Apple News and the Apple Stocks app, as Apple hands over placing ads to the chumbox firm, Taboola.
Apple News may feature more ads under a new deal with Taboola
Internet services need advertising to survive, and that's true even for Apple, which famously makes most of its income from iPhones and Macs. Consequently, Apple has an ad sales business, and in fact that has benefitted from how its privacy rules hinder rivals.
As part of its apparent moves to grow that business, though, Axios says that Apple has agreed a deal with Taboola. This firm is best known for what are called chumbox ads, where a trio of images and clickbait headlines often sit at the end of an article.
It's not clear whether the deal with Taboola is exclusive. It's possible that the deal may instead be the common practice where a firm such as Apple sells ads itself but then uses another such firm to fill in any gaps.
Whether it tops up Apple's ad sales or entirely runs the ads on both Apple News and Apple Stocks, any one advert will usually be run without Apple having to approve it. Instead, Apple is hopefully likely to use the chumbox firm's Taboola Select program for large companies, which limits ads to what are deemed to be premium publishers.
This deal currently covers adverts in Apple News and the Stocks app, but it's only part of Apple's expanding advertising business. As well as examining ads on Apple TV+, the company has reportedly been looking at how to use AI to optimize ads on the App Store.