Apple is staffing up its ad business

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a job posting indicating the future direction of a business’s revenue stream!

While enjoying the doldrums of summer, you might have missed that Apple—after taking a considerable whack to Facebook’s business model—is ramping up its advertising business.

• In August, Digiday reported that, per a job posting, Apple was building a “mobile-centric” demand-side platform, which would be used to allow advertisers to buy ads programmatically (automatically).
• Later, MarketWatch followed up with similar reporting that showed Apple was looking to hire two product managers for its ad-tech team with experience in “performance marketing, local ads, or enabling small businesses,” a crucial piece that could allow Apple to rely on many small advertisers instead of courting a few big budgets. That’s largely why advertiser boycotts can often barely affect companies like Facebook during bouts of bad publicity.
• Finally, this week the Financial Times reported that Apple was doubling the workforce of its ad business, which…checks out considering everything you’ve just read. Specifically, it is growing its ad platform team from about 250 to 466, according to LinkedIn postings and its careers site. They’ll all be tasked with growing Apple’s ad business to an expected $30 billion by 2026, according to the research group Evercore ISI.

Zoom out: Right now, Apple’s ad business primarily relies on display and search ads within its App Store and its own apps. It currently brings in around $4 billion in revenue per year, according to Bloomberg.

In other news: Apple’s iPhone beat Google’s Android in market share according to Counterpoint Research, surpassing more than 50% of all smartphones used in the US. 👀—RB