nearly useless then. It would be like putting random ads out in hopes some one from your target audience would see it. For example why would you put an ad for.
It would be like showing an ad targeted for 10 year boys are the 10 o'clock news. Now they might get some 10 year old boys who might see the ad but they will mostly be wasting money on the fact that really no one is watching of the group that the ad is targeting. But if they show the same ad during afternoon cartoons they would hit a lot of their target.
In everything like TV, magazines ect they look at what that group of people is normally interested in and puts ads that get their attention and applies to them. You need data and alalitizes to know that information. That data mining ins many ways is very important.
The clicks are what tells them that the ads are working.
You haven't responded to me yet, but you are assuming that they are getting their data in the way Apple is now blocking.
And while data mining is important, it is in many ways absolutely unnecessary. You mention demographics, that data is already available in the sales demographics of the iPhone.
You already know who is buying them and you know what ads should be put out there.
The same is true for online ads. They don't know anything about me (unless they are grabbing stuff from my cookies). But they do know that I am on this website and that I like technology. So I see technology ads or ads that relate to keywords in the currently displayed page.
The current ads works in the same way. They know I am playing this game or using this recipe app so they give me ads related to those things because they can assume that I may be interested in these other things.
Now, the question is can they still get this information? Such as what app the ad is being displayed in? Honestly, I can't see who they couldn't. But again, this is all based on assumption. Until AdMob or someone else gives us specifics of what they cannot get, we can't say they are now incapable of doing what they have been.
Some data the would need would be how often is the ad displayed to the number of clicks. They can get the click information but they can not get the displayed information. They will want to know which devises it is appearing on. (again clicks do not feed that infomation)
Location if it is just down to zip codes or just city level so ads can be more targeted. Why would i want to see an ad for a store in maine where i live in Texas. not like it is any use to me.
That is lot of information take can be collected to help make better targetted ads later on.
All of that with out any private information because they use it to form demographics. I know on my iPod I tend to block location data from being given out but that is me. It has to request your permission to send it out every time.
It is lots of little pieces of information that add up when they have large numbers of them and it forms a pattern.
I see you responded now.
Again, we don't know what information the can't get, but they can get data in other ways.
Device info? They can get this from the User agent of the browser. If they click, they are headed to the browser, so we know they clicked and we can get data from the browser.
Location information? IP addresses can often give that information. Which is why I often see adds for Chicago and IL based businesses when browsing the web. When I can't determine where they are (maybe because they are using cell data) I can display something else.
Your assumption seems to be that they can get all of this data upfront and target the ads. Quite the contrary. You often don't have enough data, but from the data you do have you can target ads, then with the data you collect you can target further.
I again contend that we simply don't have enough information to make a judgment. However, Apple is not blocking ads from competitors, they are blocking certain analytics. In addition, we are making the assumption that Apple is collecting the data that they stopping others from collecting.
Given that Apple has sold millions of dollars in advertising, I think it is safe to guess that they don't need that data as the data they do have (the demographics of iPhone buyers) is enough to sell advertising.