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New iOS ads ready to take over your screen

Apple may be making phones with larger screens, but its also going to fill those screens with larger adverts.


The company has announced two new advert formats for iOS developers. One is full-screen interstitial banner ads (as predicted in March), while the other is pre-roll videos.

As Apple puts it on a note to its developers, "Now you can deliver highly engaging ads from leading brands. Optimized for your app, pre-roll video and full-screen interstitial banner ads are now available on iOS."

Apples iAd platform has supported full-screen ads up to now, but users had to tap a banner to access them, or to reach a set break in a game or application. This will be the first time these ads can take over your screen without such prompting or restrictions.

As for the pre-roll videos, they can run in either 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios for 15, 30, or 60 seconds. They also required iOS 7 to operate.

While these new ads wont be doing anything that rival ad platforms havent been doing for some time now, they do mark a move into slightly more intrusive advertising that Apple has thus far resisted. Its not particularly good news for iPhone and iPad users.

Developers can start applying these two new ad types in their iPhone and iPad apps now.

As part of these announcements, Apple has also revealed that iAd has expanded to two new regions - Switzerland and Russia. This brings the total number of supported regions to 16.