Apple iAd Mobile Advertising Platform Unveiled at iPhone OS 4.0 Event

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We knew this one was coming and Steve Jobs didn’t disappoint. Apple’s own mobile advertising platform, called iAd as rumored before, was unveiled today at the iPhone OS 4.0 event. Is Cupertino ready to fight Google in the mobile search and advertising business?

Here’s what Steve Jobs said about the competition:

We have a lot of free or reasonably priced apps… we like that, but our devs have to find ways to make money. So our devs are putting ads into apps, and for lack of a better way to say it, we think most of this kind of advertising sucks.

Anyone  from Mountain View listening here?

Steve Jobs apparently wants to change the way mobile advertising works especially since search “is not happening on phones” at least not as he envisions it.

So what will Apple do? It will insert an ad up every 3 minutes per user per day which can amount to up to 1 billion ad opportunities per day. That’s an impressive number right there and it can be a very impressive revenue source both for developers and, most importantly, for Cupertino.

But Apple won’t stop there as it wants to make these iAds “deliver interaction and emotion.” Say what? I believe lots of users will go through various emotions while having to move past those in-app ads all day long. But hey, we want free apps so from now on we have to deal with iAds.

The new iAds system will be built into the new iPhone OS 4.0. The ads will keep you in the app which means you won’t have to exit any of your favorite free apps while they show iAds. All of these ads will be sold and hosted by Apple and 60% of the revenue goes to the developers. How do you like them Apples now?

And by the way, all those ads that will literally fill our screens (maybe that’s why the iPhone 4G needs a taller display in the first place) have been done in HTML5 and are really interactive (videos and/or games included). El Jobso says so himself while managing to poke Adobe  eight minutes after it hit Google:

So all this is done in HTML5 by the way.

Let’s hear it from developers now! How do you find the new iAd platform?