Ads will Soon Appear on the Apple App Store Homepage

They can be found on the pages of certain apps as well.

Apple is well known for boasting that it will never violate your privacy in order to deliver advertisements, yet the company does operate an advertising business on its App Store and elsewhere. According to 9to5Mac, the company is currently growing that business by introducing a new ad spot to its "Today" homepage tab and on individual app pages. These are additional advertisements to those already present in the search results and on the main "Search" page of the App Store.

According to a statement from Apple, "Apple Search Ads offers opportunity for developers of all sizes to build their businesses." These new ad placements "are built upon the same foundation as our existing advertising offers, and, like our other advertising offerings, they will only feature content from apps' approved App Store product pages, and they will comply to the same stringent privacy rules."

When opening the App Store, the Today page is the first thing that appears, and it offers a curated and tailored selection of apps to browse (it arrived in 2017 with a significant App Store redesign). The "You Might Also Like" portion of an app's product page contains the other new space. Alongside Apple's own content, developers will be able to advertise apps with the new adverts, which are explicitly labelled as such.

According to Apple, the new slots would abide by its privacy and transparency principles by never serving tailored advertising to people under the age of 18, by never exploiting sensitive data, and by avoiding hyper-targeting. Apple intends to begin testing the new ad spots "soon," though the company has not said when they will go live.

Developers will be able to add adverts outside of the Search tab and Search results thanks to the new advertising options in the App Store. First and foremost, the "Today" site of the App Store will soon feature a new advertising space. This area is found in the second position on the Today page, as shown in the figure above.

The Today tab will still be primarily devoted to curation and discovery, according to Apple, and the advertisement will be identified as such using the same blue banner and background as Search advertising. Given that it is located on the page that customers see when they first visit the App Store, this is undoubtedly going to be a very valuable ad location for both Apple and developers.

Direct product page placement is the second new form of advertising. Developers will now be able to post advertisements on the product pages for other apps, as a result. This area is situated underneath the banner section that displays further apps created by that developer at the very bottom of the product page.

When competing for the placement of product page ads, developers won't be able to specify a particular application. Twitter couldn't expressly target Tweetbot, for example. However, the advertisements will be pertinent to every product page. This implies that you might (and probably will) see advertisements for direct rivals on app pages.