In reality, ad-funded apps never really took off on iOS, probably due to free-with-in-app-purchase becoming a big money maker. And with the growth of Android, making a platform specific ad was not nearly as appealing.
They wanted to jump start the service with few select big clients, like Nike, Coca Cola, Disney etc.
For those kind of companies, 1 million for an ad campaign in a major mobile platform is small change.
Nope, it did happen. When they started it they had quite nice rooster of collaborating companies, and quite good conversion rates. At some point, they had 15% of the mobile ad market.
Plus, they didn't just go from 1M to $50 because nobody came to them at $1M. That was the inital price back in 2010, and just for the launch. Afterwars it was a gradual progress of opening the service and letting more advertisers in (went to $500,000, then to $100,000 etc)
The large minimum spends still apply to rich media iAds. Despite iAd Producer being readily available, the ads you create in it can only be used as creative for rich media campaigns. That requires a relationship with an iAd account manager and a minimum spend of $100,000 per campaign per region (as of last week).
Compared to other mobile Ad networks is this bad?
Remember this is not taps, this is actual downloads...
> We chose to run the ads on apps from the following categories: Photo & Video, Social Networking, Entertainment, Games, Food & Drink and Utilities.
Those are some of the very largest targets you can have. Apple was unable to provide enough impressions to meet $10 a day.
(Their average CPC was $.01, and their desired CPA was $.40).
Agreed that $10 a day is not enough to keep their app rocketing up the install lists. However, like any PPC or CPA advertising, iAd is a bidding system - and priority of impressions will go towards those that bid more. Your assertion would be like having a Google AdWords bid of $.01 for a high-performing keyword, and because you aren't featured on page 1 of the SERPs & only get a few impressions, concluding that Google doesn't have the audience to support your budget.
Just a question is the CPA also really bad compared to the other ad networks?
I'm interested to know if anyone has any experience from the developer side, how iAd compares to non-native Ad services within iOS apps. What is that experience like?
