The tension between Apple and Google is no longer a rumor.
It’s for real.
The former friendly giants have found themselves at odds within the digital advertising space, a bustling marketplace that, according to Google, Apple is attempting to shut them out of.
When the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Apple and Google enjoyed a positive, constructive working relationship – the product of which was the juggernaut YouTube app for Apple’s groundbreaking smartphone. Fast forward three years, and Google and Apple are locking horns over Cupertino’s ambitious endeavors in mobile advertising via the new iAd platform.
Formally commencing July 1st with better than $60 million in major advertising commitments already in place, iAd is touted as having the potential to claim nearly half of the entire mobile advertising market share by the end of 2010. But in getting to the top, Apple is less than interested in taking Google up a notch with it.
Apple is effectively shutting out AdMob from iAd. Acquired by Google in what was the biggest mobile ad firm acquisition in history, AdMob is the largest mobile ad firm in the world. And it appears Apple doesn’t want AdMob treading on its newly would-be-conquered mobile ad territory.
Understandably, Google is angry. And regulators are concerned – concerned enough, in fact, to plan an instigation around Apple’s anti-Google stance.
As a result of the brewing bad blood between Google and Apple, there is talk that the search engine giant is eager to punish Apple and could do so by yanking YouTube from Apple’s iPhone and other popular mobile products. From where Google is sitting, Apple has started a war. And Google plans to fight.
