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Apple's iOS ads are about to take over your whole screen

Apple's iOS ads are about to take over your whole screen

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Two new ad formats from Apple are designed to take up every pixel

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Apple's assuredly making phones with bigger screen sizes, and ahead of that, its ads are getting bigger too. Today the company announced two new ad formats for developers as part of its iAd platform: full-screen interstitial banner ads, and pre-roll videos. Both are designed to take over the entire screen while using an app, and bring developers higher revenue than they'd get with smaller, less intrusive banner ads.

Other ad networks have offered those for a while now, including Google's mobile ad platform. However, up until now, Apple's required some user interaction for ads to take over the screen: you needed to tap a banner for it to pop up, or hit a predefined break during an app or game.

60 second videos between rounds

The new format is present on both the iPhone and iPad, and available for developers to start using in their apps today, though the pre-roll videos require iOS 7. According to Apple's documentation, these videos can run 15, 30, or 60 seconds in length.

iAds were originally introduced as an alternative to mobile advertising that would take users outside of an app and into the browser when tapped. Apple offered developers a way to add advertising to their apps with a few lines of code, and a system that would open interactive ads inside the application without jettisoning people away from what they were doing. That system was available on top of Apple's own in-app purchase, which for a time was only available for paid apps. Nonetheless, Apple's had troubles wrestling share from Google, which offers its ads on multiple platforms, including Apple's. AdWeek caught wind of the new formats back in March.