Daring Fireball: The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them

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The Ads on Apple News Continue to Suck, but at Least There Are a Lot of Them

Thursday, 23 July 2026

Kirk McElhearn, back in February:

I use Apple News to keep up on topics that I don’t find in sources<br>I pay for (The Guardian and The New York Times). But there’s no<br>way I’m going to pay the exorbitant price Apple wants for Apple<br>News+ — £13 — because, while you get more publications, you<br>still get ads.

And those ads have gotten worse recently. Many if not most of them<br>look like and probably are scams. Here are a few examples from<br>Apple News today.

One of the ads he examined was, supposedly, from a small company going out of business because the proprietor — supposedly a straight-out-of-Central-Casting kind old woman — was retiring after 26 years. McElhearn looked up the domain name and it had only just been created last year, and was registered from a company in China.

Two years ago this very week, I wrote about Apple striking a deal with Taboola to sell ads for Apple News. In that post, I quoted Eric Seufert (of Mobile Dev Memo) posting on Threads:

Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim<br>that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective,<br>assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads<br>must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.

They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s<br>the point.

Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject<br>ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace<br>ads personalization.

Now quoting from myself in that same article:

If you told me that the ads in Apple News have been sold by<br>Taboola for the last few years, I’d have said, “Oh, that makes<br>sense.” Because the ads in Apple News — at least the ones I see — already look like chumbox Taboola ads. Even worse, they’re<br>incredibly repetitious. [...]

So while I don’t think it’s good news that Apple is partnering<br>with Taboola, I don’t expect it to make any discernible difference<br>in the ad quality or frequency. Maybe it will improve the variety?

Privacy is not the issue with Apple’s Taboola partnership, or Apple advertising in general. The issues are quality and user experience. I was correct that the partnership has made no discernible difference in ad quality or frequency. And it hasn’t made any improvement to variety either. Here’s a collection of ads I continue to see in Apple News — often with the same ad appearing 3–4 times in the same article, as I scroll. (I posted the same image in my recent article “John Ternus Should Reverse Apple’s Slide Down the Advertising Slippery Slope”, if you’re thinking it looks familiar.)

The ads I see in Apple News are not relevant or informed. And, to be clear, I have “Personalized Ads” turned on in Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising (which makes me wonder if turning that off might actually make the ads even worse). The ads shown in the App Store never seem contextually relevant to me. So I have no faith that the ads that Apple is supposedly on the cusp of serving in Apple Maps are going to be good.

Back in March I wrote:

I’m not going to prejudge the actual experience, and you shouldn’t<br>either. I also do not begrudge Apple for wanting to monetize<br>Maps. But if the addition of ads does make the Apple<br>Maps experience worse, why won’t Apple let us buy our way out of<br>seeing them? Netflix doesn’t force us to watch their<br>ads. YouTube Premium is arguably the best<br>bang-for-the-buck in the entire world of content subscriptions.<br>Why should Apple One subscribers still see these ads in<br>Apple Maps?

This to me is proof that Apple leadership is suffering from cognitive dissonance over their slide into advertising. They’re conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what mades the brand what it is. But now they’re stricken with the mindset that it’s the Apple brand that makes something a high-quality superior experience. If it comes from Apple it must be great — that sort of thinking. The ads in Apple News and the App Store can’t be detrimental to the user experiences and at times even embarrassingly crude or downright scammy because Apple doesn’t ship things that are detrimental to the user experience or embarrassingly crude — and certainly never with even a whiff of scamminess.

My theory is that’s why Apple isn’t allowing users to buy our way out of the ads. When streaming services like Netflix let you pay more money for ad-free tiers, it’s an explicit acknowledgement that the experience with ads is worse. Apple...