that would serve ads on Major League Baseball coverage through the streaming service, though those ads were sold by MLB, not Apple).
How big Apple’s ad business could become is far from certain. Newman sees plenty of room for growth but can’t see the company rivaling the largest digital ad giants. “I can see Apple becoming something on the level of Microsoft, maybe a little larger, but significantly behind the likes of Google and Meta,” he says. That would mean ad revenue in the tens rather than hundreds of billions.
Newman says that while Apple’s devices and services provide plenty of potential ad inventory, they don’t provide the scale or lucrative opportunities of Google’s search engine, Meta’s billions of social app users, or Amazon’s everything store. Though if persistent rumorsprove true, the project could open lucrative new ad opportunities.
And the company’s privacy pledges could limit how far it can go with ad targeting. Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a bit under half the company’s services revenue.