Many people say that Erich Schmidt quit the Apple Board of Directors because of iPhone/Android competition, but this application suggests another reason.
Google AdSense is great at monetizing high volume, low cost content. I work at a news aggregator and our eCPM is around $.50 from AdSense. I suspect this is typical. This puts a cap on how much it can cost for us to produce content: more than $.50 for 1000 page views means we're losing money. If you want to make more expensive content, it will be hard to make money using AdSense, because AdSense does not take into account the quality of your content.
It's hard to know what Apple is planning based on a patent application, but we do know one thing: nearly a decade's work has gone into iTunes. It is one of the biggest content distribution systems on the web. Compared to YouTube and Hulu, I would bet it's more profitable also. Whatever they are planning is probably related to extending the iTunes/App Store framework: they currently distribute songs, TV shows, movies, games, and apps. Ebooks, news, magazines and blogs seems like a plausible next step.
Google AdSense is great at monetizing high volume, low cost content. I work at a news aggregator and our eCPM is around $.50 from AdSense. I suspect this is typical. This puts a cap on how much it can cost for us to produce content: more than $.50 for 1000 page views means we're losing money. If you want to make more expensive content, it will be hard to make money using AdSense, because AdSense does not take into account the quality of your content.
It's hard to know what Apple is planning based on a patent application, but we do know one thing: nearly a decade's work has gone into iTunes. It is one of the biggest content distribution systems on the web. Compared to YouTube and Hulu, I would bet it's more profitable also. Whatever they are planning is probably related to extending the iTunes/App Store framework: they currently distribute songs, TV shows, movies, games, and apps. Ebooks, news, magazines and blogs seems like a plausible next step.