Bad News: Apple ❤️ Taboola

Don’t you hate it when a friend starts dating someone you just can’t stand? That’s how I feel about Apple’s new ad sales deal:

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.

Taboola is one of the companies that power those “more reading” boxes at the bottom of articles. You know the ones, the clickbait-filled chum boxes that say things like “Doctors think every 50-year-old in Horsham should do this!”. They have been slowly, slowly, slowly training us all not to click on anything that looks like a “more reading” box over the past 10 years.

Putting advertising sourced via this company into Apple News is not an encouraging sign. As Om Malik puts it:

For over a decade, I have been critical of Taboola (and its one time rival, Outbrain), equating them to the internet’s venereal disease that never goes away. In 2017, when the two companies merged, it became clear that what was the herpes of the internet was mutating into a super bug. I said as much on Twitter. Well, that day has come, and even Apple is now infected.

He’s cancelled his Apple News subscription. Now, admittedly, they’re talking about “native advertising” rather than chum boxes, but there’s still cause to worry.

Souring the news experience

I’m a heavy user of Apple News+, the paid version of the service: I realised a while ago that, as a heavy reader across multiple magazines and newspapers, it made much more financial for me to access everything from The Atlantic to The Times through Apple News+. The small amount of inconvenience incurred is worth it through the money saved on multiple subscriptions. After all, I have two growing children who need to be fed and who want to go on expensive school trips…

This, though, makes me worry. I really don’t want to see Apple degrade the experience, both for selfish reasons, and on behalf of the publishers who have been successfully using the app as a top end of the funnel audience acquisition tool. Now, Apple could be smart enough to have struck a deal that means its app won’t be full of, well, chum.

But let’s wait and see.

Update: 17/7/24

Nick Heer:

These moves may not feel like they fit Apple’s brand if your impression of it was formed more than ten years ago. There is no use protesting that they are out of character, however, when priorities like these feel like they represent today’s Apple.

Ouch. But yes, feels spot on.