Apple iAd Advertising Program to Cost $10 Million to Early Adopters

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The seventh tentpole of iPhone OS 4.0, as it was described by Steve Jobs, is iAd, Apple’s first mobile advertising platform due to be unveiled later this year. It’s already clear that Apple will make a lot of cash off iAd on the long run as those iAds will appear on more and more iPhones, iPods and iPads. But how much will those early advertisers have to pay to get an early slot?

According to a recent report, Apple will not charge $100,000 to $200,000 to companies to for an iAd initial deal but $10,000,000 to be the first to run ads on the existing Apple mobile devices. It looks like Apple wants to charge $1 million for ads on its mobile devices this year to those companies that are willing to wait a while. If memory serves me right 40% of the money Apple gets goes to Cupertino and the 60% that remains heads to app developers.

Let’s look at the numbers more closely, shall we? Apple will charge advertisers a penny for each banner impression while every customer tapping on the banners will bring Apple $2. That means that $1 million will get you up to 1 million banner views although that’s just in theory. You’d have to run a really sad company if $1 million will get you 1 million impressions and thus no actual taps.

Now if I were Google I would definitely buy one of those early slots and advertise Google Search, Google’s Nexus One, the Chrome browser and lots of others products. At least I’d get 10 million views if nobody would be allowed to tap my banner. But I am not Google and therefore I am definitely interested to see what companies are going to pay the premium $10 million for being among the first ones to offer interactive iAds to iPhone, iPod and iPad users later this summer. Surely WWDC 2010 will reveal all these details, all we need to do is wait.

Seriously, Google, give it a thought; we’d love to see your iAds on iPhones and iPads, wouldn’t we, folks?