The cloack and dagger war between Apple and Google continues. It appears that Google might be locked out of the emerging market for mobile advertisement on Apple devices:

Apple quietly changed the terms of service for the iPhone developer agreement Monday along with the release of developer version of iOS4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to MediaMemo and several other blogs. If preliminary interpretations of a key section are correct, Google's newly acquired AdMob subsidiary will be unable to share ad analytic information with its customers who have placed ads in applications on the iPhone, rendering those ads much less valuable.

Either this is a legal quirk, or, more likely, Apple intends to extract from Google a heavy price for playing on the wrong side of their prisoner's dilemma game. In the meantime, Google protests the agreement.

tags: battle, technology, apple, google, advertisement, business, law, information, tool, detection



From a system perspective, Apple prevents Google from solving a detection problem, therefore, the latter cannot develop an improved control (setup) sub-system. As the result, the overall efficiency of Google's adMob will be significantly lower than Apple's iAd.

As we know, the purpose of an ad-insertion mechanism is to deliver the right ad to the right user. The better the match, the more efficient the mechanism. The rightness of the match is determined through detection and differentiation of prior user interactions with content and/or ads. When detection is disabled, a good match cannot be found systematically, therefore the overall efficiency of the ad delivery mechanism will be a function of unknown factors.