A Perfect Example

This Ads in iTunes story is a perfect example of my last post on the Apple rumor mill. Everyone is all a twitter over an Advertising Age article that claims Apple is going to start putting ads in iTunes. Everyone has jumped all over this as if Apple is going to be putting out ads that play along with your music, but there is NO information available to support this conclusion.

It's all based on the fact that ESPN has said that they are "looking at new technology that will provide a much richer advertising experience and hope to roll that out very soon." for their podcasts.That's it. Nothing more. They could do that with a standard enhanced podcast. Ad Age then tries to bolster the argument by saying that Steve has publicly supported ads in podcasts. What? How in the world does that translate into Apple providing the advertising?

So we've essentially made a huge logical leap from one free content provider saying that they're going to start providing "a richer advertising experience" (i.e. enhanced podcasts...something they've been free to do since day one and that video podcasts do all the time) to Apple providing ads while you listen to music in your own library.

This is all totally disregarding the point that this would be a terrible idea. As the almighty John Gruber reminds us of on a nearly weekly basis, Apple is a hardware company. iTunes is there to sell iPods. The music store is there to sell iPods. It's all there to sell iPods. So as long as it breaks even, mission accomplished. Ads would be a perfect way to kill iTunes and it's iPod halo. And even there was some grain of truth to this, do you really think Apple would let ESPN talk about it so casually?

Double sigh....