Apple partners with leading chumbox provider to sell ads

Taboola, one of the biggest providers of chumbox ads on the internet, has a deal to sell ads that will show in Apple’s News and Stocks apps, Axios reports. Apple lists Taboola as one of its “Authorised advertising resellers” whose ads appear in the apps’ feeds and “select publisher articles” for users in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada.

The deal doesn’t mean Apple News will soon be littered with chumboxes — those ad boxes formatted to look like news stories that you see at the bottom of articles (including at The Verge) with low-rent,often ridiculous clickbait headlines. Taboola makes those, and they apparently do quite well. But it also sells “native” ads, which are meant to blend in with surrounding content, from “a curated set of premium publishers” through its Taboola Select program, notes Axios.

In the case of Apple, the company’s ad moderator team has “certain levels of control around which advertisers it will sell through to Apple apps,” Axios writes, paraphrasing Taboola CEO Adam Singolda.

It’s not clear when Apple and Taboola made their deal, but the company has been listed on Apple’s site since at least May, according to The Internet Archive. It appears to have replaced Yahoo. NBCUniversal also sells ads that show up in Apple News and Apple Stocks, but only in the US and the UK.

I took a quick jaunt through Apple News while writing this story, and you won’t BELIEVE the ads I saw IN JUST FIVE MINUTES!

… Normal ads. They were just regular, mundane ads.