By John Gruber

I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you still get ads.

And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.

One of the ads he examined was, supposedly, from a small company going out of business because the proprietor — supposedly a straight-out-of-Central-Casting kind old woman — was retiring after 26 years. McElhearn looked up the domain name and it had only just been created last year, and was registered from a company in China.

Two years ago this very week, I wrote about Apple striking a deal with Taboola to sell ads for Apple News. In that post, I quoted Eric Seufert (of Mobile Dev Memo) posting 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.

Now quoting from myself in that same article:

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 see — already look like chumbox Taboola ads. Even worse, they’re incredibly repetitious. [...]

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?

Privacy is not the issue with Apple’s Taboola partnership, or Apple advertising in general. The issues are quality and user experience. I was correct that the partnership has made no discernible difference in ad quality or frequency. And it hasn’t made any improvement to variety either. Here’s a collection of ads I continue to see in Apple News — often with the same ad appearing 3–4 times in the same article, as I scroll. (I posted the same image in my recent article “John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope”, if you’re thinking it looks familiar.)

The ads I see in Apple News are not relevant or informed. And, to be clear, I have “Personalized Ads” turned on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising (which makes me wonder if turning that off might actually make the ads even worse). The ads shown in the App Store never seem contextually relevant to me. So I have no faith that the ads that Apple is supposedly on the cusp of serving in Apple Maps are going to be good.

Back in March I wrote:

I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions. Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in Apple Maps?

This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what mades the brand what it is. But now they’re stricken with the mindset that it’s the Apple brand that makes something a high-quality superior experience. If it comes from Apple it must be great — that sort of thinking. The ads in Apple News and the App Store can’t be detrimental to the user experiences and at times even embarrassingly crude or downright scammy because Apple doesn’t ship things that are detrimental to the user experience or embarrassingly crude — and certainly never with even a whiff of scamminess.

My theory is that’s why Apple isn’t allowing users to buy our way out of the ads. When streaming services like Netflix let you pay more money for ad-free tiers, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that the experience with ads is worse. Apple doesn’t offer ad-free tiers for the App Store or (soon) Apple Maps1 because, I think, they can’t bring themselves to admit that by adding ads to these services they have made them worse. If you refuse to admit that the ads make these services worse, you also can’t admit that there’s a reason to offer an ad-free experience. So the thinking is something like “Apple always focuses on the user experience, and never deliberately makes the user experience worse. Therefore, if an Apple service shows ads, those ads are high quality and don’t detract from the quality of the product or the experience of using it. Therefore, there’s no reason to offer users a paid ad-free tier, because there’s no reason to want to avoid Apple’s ads.”

It’s a textbook case of Upton Sinclair’s famous adage: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” The obvious truth is that Apple’s ads just plain suck. They are not good at advertising-based services. And it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re not good at advertising-based services, because the incentives for advertising-based services are in direct opposition to the incentives for everything Apple actually is good at. To wit: offering superior products worth paying a premium price for.

One can argue that an ad-free Apple Maps experience ought to be included with the price of the devices Apple sells. It’s even easier to argue that the App Store ought to be ad-free for everyone, based on its exclusive role in software distribution and the 15–30 percent commission Apple takes on every transaction. But if Apple simply made the App Store and Apple Maps ad-free for users paying for iCloud+ or Apple One, I’d stop complaining. That would make it clear: the full Apple experience requires not just an Apple device, but an Apple subscription. But the way things stand now, that ad-free experience isn’t even available.

Apple News is different because the inclusion of ads is controlled by the publishers, not by Apple. If you read Daring Fireball on Apple News, for example, you don’t see their crummy chumbox ads, because I don’t participate in that system. Most of the cringe-inducing ads I see in Apple News are seemingly sold through Apple Ads, though, so I’m not arguing that Apple isn’t ulimately responsible for the Apple News reading experience. I’m just saying they can’t just flip a switch and offer a paid-subscription no-ads Apple News experience without the agreement of every single participating publisher. The App Store and Apple Maps, however, are services under Apple’s complete control. Every ad shown in those apps is Apple’s choice to show. ↩︎