In an email to developers, Apple says that new App Store ad placements will be available for the 2022 holiday season
- Apple is planning to release new ad “placements” as soon as the holiday season of this year. — The new ad units represent a significant expansion in Apple's advertising inventory …
CNBCKif Leswing
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's email to developers frames the new units as a significant expansion of App Store ad inventory, timed for the highest-intent shopping window of the year — a window where TikTok Shop is subsidizing seller discounts of up to 50% to pull holiday spending onto its own surface. The prize Apple is auctioning access to is large: its own site reports more than 800 million weekly App Store visitors.
The move also reads as an early step in a longer arc — Apple later announced plans to roll out more ads in App Store search results in 2026, making this 2022 holiday expansion the first visible beat of a multi-year build-out of store advertising.
First-order effects
Developers gain new bidding slots for holiday-season discoverability, while Apple converts its 800M-plus weekly store traffic into direct ad revenue rather than relying solely on app sales and subscriptions.
Second-order effects
Holiday app-marketing budgets face a more crowded auction at exactly the moment TikTok Shop's discounted shopping event competes for the same consumer attention, raising effective user-acquisition costs during Q4.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds through the 2026 search-results expansion, the App Store shifts structurally from a commission-based storefront toward an advertising-driven distribution market, where visibility is increasingly purchased rather than earned organically.
The trend: App stores are evolving from transaction-fee businesses into advertising platforms, with holiday seasons serving as the launch window for each new wave of ad inventory.
I'm unsure if a timeline for Apple's new ad placements in the App Store had previously been announced, but it appears that they'll be live for the “holiday season” https://twitter.com/...
Apple is starting to promote its new advertising offerings. This will no doubt raise a lot of eyebrows in the ad tech world. Apple effectively cleared the way when it implemented new privacy policies last year. Good scoop from @kifleswing https://www.cnbc.com/...
Apple's ad business to the rescue for all the apps that have been getting poor results due to their privacy changes. Great way to create a problem then solve it in a way that makes them billions while being praised as heroes. Respect 🫡 https://twitter.com/...
Nope. Don't like this one bit. I cheered when Apple blocked creepy ad tracking. I feel like an idiot now that it's become apparent that they were primarily doing this to reduce competition. https://twitter.com/...
@QuinnyPig What made Apple so great was them being incentivized to kill competitors by improving privacy. Now they're just part of the problem and 100% deserve an antitrust suit.
Funny how earlier today there was good cop/bad cop article about Phil Schiller and the App Store, pretending that he fights back against business interests. There are no good cops inside Apple. https://twitter.com/...