• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, January 14, 2016

How do you like them apples? Some six years after breaking into mobile advertising, Apple is basically throwing in the towel. 

Having failed to turn its iAd platform into a moneymaker, the tech giant reportedly plans to send home its entire sales team, and let publishers and customers interact directly.

As such, publishers will now get to keep 100% of their iAd ad revenue. That’s a nice bump from Apple’s previous arrangement with developers, which gave them a 70% cut of revenue.

The news shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who’s been following iAd’s ups and downs. In late 2014, Apple more or less reintroduced iAd, and then struck multiple ad tech partnerships to resurrect the business as a programmatic platform.

Still, why couldn’t a company of Apple’s high caliber turn such a hot market into gold?

Apparently, it just wasn’t cut out for making, managing, and selling mobile ads. “It’s just not something we’re good at,” an unnamed Apple insider tells BuzzFeed News.

Specifically, it seems as if Apple’s immodesty and notoriously controlling nature doomed iAd from the beginning. If you don’t recall, early pricing for ads was off the charts, and Apple apparently never learned to make nice with the developer community.

In turn, CEO Tim Cook admitted in late 2014 that revenue from Apple’s iAd business was making up a “very small” part of its bottom line.

By eMarketer’s estimate, the iAd platform was responsible for a measly 5.1% share of the mobile display ad business last year.