[NewsPoster]

Apple is making a major change to its advertising business, moving away from sales teams in favor of a more automated approach, according to a report. Rather than working to sell ad inventory, Apple is allegedly working to take itself out of the equation when it comes to iAd sales, with its own sales teams being phased out and publishers, developers, and content creators themselves being given the opportunity to manage their own sales through the platform instead.

Since Apple will be taking a back seat on the platform, it will not be taking its usual 30 percent cut of ad sales, with publishers able to keep all of the advertising revenue to themselves, reports BuzzFeed. A source admits "It's just not something (Apple is) good at," with regards to advertising sales and creation, with both tasks as well as management of ad spots being passed on to parties with a more vested interest.

The move will be "great for publishers," according to advertising industry sources of the report. "It gives them direct dialogue with their customers as opposed to forcing them to go through an Apple middleman. Access will be more plentiful and easier to manage – theoretically." Big publishing groups "will just fold programmatic buys into the stuff they're selling across all their properties." It is unclear if companies working on programmatic ad buying for the platform will benefit or lose out from the change in situation, but it is possible publishers could choose to work with them more to optimize direct ad sales.

Despite being operational for the last six years, iAds hasn't become the major advertising powerhouse it could have been. For the last year, data from Emarketer suggested iAd's market share of mobile advertising revenue was 5.1 percent, lower than Google's 9.5 percent and Facebook's 37.9 percent.

Sources claim iAds sales teams will be offered buyouts as part of the move, with the first wave potentially happening as early as this week.

[nowwhatareyoulookingat]

makes it worse. say hello to advertising malware, now that Apple is handing it off to publishers who are solely interested in making the most money with the least effort.

[Mike Wuerthele]

That'll depend on how much Apple maintains control over the format itself. We'll see how it goes, and we're not convinced that this is actually the case.

[burger]

I moved away from iOS last year. It's had some growing pains, mostly in the area of integratied messaging with the Mac Messages app. Other than that, it was easy peasy. I don't specifically find the ads to be more or less intrusive, and I haven't experienced any of the adware or malware issues I thought I might.