Apple’s controversial partnership with Taboola to serve ads on Apple News appears to be going exactly as expected. Here’s why.
Not a great look given Apple’s ever-expanding advertising ambitions
In case you’re not familiar with Taboola, it’s one of the largest ad tech companies in the world with a market cap of $1 billion.
It’s also widely known to serve rather low-quality and borderline untrustworthy ads, which was surprising Axios in 2024 he announced that Apple had entered into an agreement with him to sell and place advertisements on Apple News.
at that time Brave fireball‘s John Gruber noted that, while odd, the new partnership may not actually move the quality needle one way or the other, as Apple News’ ad selection wasn’t exactly stellar to begin with.
If only. As veteran tech reporter Kirk McElhearn wrote this week in an article titled “I Now Assume All Apple News Ads Are Scams”:
I use Apple News to keep up with topics I can’t find in the sources I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple News+ – £13 – because even though you’re getting more publications, you’re still getting ads.
And those ads have gotten worse lately. Many, if not most, of them look and are probably scams. Here are some examples from today’s Apple News.
McElhearn goes on to show several examples of AI-generated product image ads, one of which does a comically poor job of trying to hide Google’s Gemini watermark.
Additionally, all of the ads in his post are from companies whose domains were only created last month, and at least one of them uses a famously misleading technique that the US Better Business Bureau has actually warned against.
To read McElhearn’s post and see the ads he talks about, click this link.
9to5Mac
While McElhearn is the first to note that low quality and recently registered domains don’t necessarily mean an ad is fraudulent, he’s right that it does look bad, especially for a service that has struggled for years.
When it comes to making a good impression, even high-quality ads can make a difference.
And while the broader ad market is full of bad actors who game the system to slip through security checks and run fraud, this experience (and with most ads likely if not scams) makes Apple’s growing push to push more ads across the ecosystem increasingly distasteful.
What is your experience with Apple News? Let us know in the comments.
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