Ads are coming to Maps because Apple needs to keep growing
Updated March 24: Apple did officially announce ads coming to maps, as part of a larger Apple Business suite of tools. Apple Business is available in April, but ads in Maps is coming this summer, marking a notable shift in how the company approaches monetization within its mapping platform.
Apple is apparently not yet done degrading its products in the name of making even more money. The $3.7 trillion company needs more services revenue, and so the next core user experience to get affected by ads is Apple Maps, one of its most widely used tools.
It was reported last year that Apple was working on plans to bring ads to Maps, and now a new Bloomberg report says the introduction of ads could come as soon as this month, suggesting the rollout may happen sooner than many users expected.
Ads in Apple Maps are said to function similarly to those in Google Maps. Companies can bid to occupy ad slots for certain search queries and will be shown over and alongside natural search results, changing how users discover businesses on the platform.
Search for “best sushi near me,” for example, and you’ll get a list of results topped by any sushi restaurants that paid to be there. These sponsored listings will appear before organic results, potentially influencing user choices from the very beginning.
This isn’t new, but it is disappointing. The high volume and preferential treatment of paid search results make using Yelp utterly frustrating, and the same goes for finding something on Google Maps, even though it still performs well in navigation and directions.
Corrupting natural content with ads has degraded the internet as a whole, and other Apple products in particular. The App Store has become cluttered with paid placement and scores boosted by fake reviews, making it harder for users to trust rankings.
The TV app has occupied prime real estate on the first screen with an entire row of F1 content for weeks, even if the user has shown no interest in sports. This highlights how ads can override personalization and reduce relevance in user experience.
The company even abused push notifications for the Wallet app to promote movie tickets for F1: The Movie. A couple of years ago, Apple also began selling ad spots in Apple News, expanding its advertising reach across multiple services.
It’s hard to see the good in this for Apple users. Nobody likes ads, but they help pay for free products and services. At a minimum, ads should clearly be separated from content through banners or boxes that don’t interfere with usability.
Selling search result ads is the most egregious form, as it corrupts the basic function of search. Results are often led by paid listings, and many ads are not clearly marked, making it harder for users to distinguish between paid and organic content.
It’s especially egregious when you consider that Apple is one of the wealthiest companies in the world. It’s worth about $3.7 trillion, has of $66 billion in cash on hand, and spends around $25 billion every quarter on stock buybacks.
This is not a company that needs to corrupt your Maps search results with ads. But services revenue must grow, and now it seems Maps experience is just the latest in a long line of Apple services to be made worse with ads.
