Apple’s controversial partnership with Taboola to serve ads on Apple News seems to be going exactly as expected. Here’s why.
Not a great look for Apple’s ever-expanding ad ambitions
In case you’re not familiar with Taboola, it is one of the largest ad-tech companies in the world, with a US$1 billion market cap.
It is also widely known to serve rather low-quality and borderline untrustworthy ads, which was surprising when Axios reported in 2024 that Apple had struck a deal with it to sell and place ads on Apple News.
At the time, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber noted that while odd, the new partnership might actually not move the quality needle one way or another, since Apple News’ selection of ads 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 that All Ads on Apple News Are Scams”:
I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in 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, while you get more publications, you still get ads.
And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many, if not most, of them look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from Apple News today.
McElhearn goes on to show multiple examples of ads featuring images of AI-generated products, one of which did a comically bad job at trying to hide the Google Gemini watermark.
Moreover, all ads listed on his post are from companies whose domains were created as recently as last month, and at least one of them employs a famously misleading technique that has actually been warned against by the US Better Business Bureau.
To read McElhearn’s post and see the ads he’s talking about, follow this link.
9to5Mac’s take
While McElhearn is the first to note that being low-quality and having recently-registered domains don’t necessarily equate to an ad being a scam, he does have a point that this is a bad look, particularly for a service that has struggled for years.
When it comes to providing a good experience, even high-quality ads can make a difference.
And while the broader ad market is filled with bad actors who game the system to slip past security checks and run scams, this experience (even with the majority of ads probably not being scams) makes Apple’s growing push to bring more ads across its ecosystem feel increasingly icky.
What has your experience been like on Apple News? Let us know in the comments.
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