Apple taps infamous Taboola as new ad seller for Apple News and Stocks

Apple has struck a deal with a new partner for ad sales in its Apple News and Stocks apps. Unfortunately, that ad seller—Taboola—carries a reputation for employing some of the worst ads you’ve ever seen.

Outsourcing ad sales for Apple News and Stocks apps

Sara Fischer, writing for Axios:

Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios…Taboola’s effort to build trust with Apple across its various teams and stakeholders was “a multiyear process,'” Singolda said.

Taboola is infamous for its use of chumbox ads across the web—the kind of clickbait, oft-grotesque and/or shocking ads designed to grab your attention. Often they’re found at the bottom of an article, and bear no distinguishable relation to an actual product being advertised.

So should we be worried about such ads making their way to News and Stocks? Probably not. Fischer continues:

Taboola works with more than 9,000 publishing partners to sell native ad space across their properties to more than 18,000 advertisers globally. Most of those client relationships are direct, which makes it easier for Taboola’s team of more than 100 ad moderators to establish certain levels of control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps, Singolda said.

In other words, Taboola may be responsible for garbage ads across some of the other web partners it serves, but it also has a team of human moderators who will be monitoring and selectively serving ads to Apple customers.

Here’s hoping that means the ad quality will, at a minimum, stay the same as it is now, and perhaps even improve.

Previously, reports indicated Apple was exploring using AI as a tool for ad placement across its apps, including the App Store. This Taboola partnership doesn’t entirely rule out that possibility, but it does seem to indicate the company is sticking with human ad curators for now—at least for News and Stocks.

How would you judge the quality of ads in Apple News and Stocks? Let us know in the comments.