1 billion ad impressions a day? Not so fast

During the iPhone 4.0 Preview Event on Thursday, Steve Jobs previewed Apple’s iAds platform, a simple way for developers to integrate ads into their apps. Jobs show a calculation explaining how Apple would be able to show 1 billion ad impressions per day.

Jobs’ missed one critical number in his calculation of 1 billion ad impressions per day. His calculation was (30 minutes ÷ 3 ads per minute) x 100 million devices = 1 billion impressions.

The “30 minutes ÷ 3 ads per minute” part of this calculation assumes that all apps will include iAds, which is of course false.

Jobs’ forgot to count developer adoption. The 1 billion figure is only correct if each user only used applications which included iAds, which we all know will not be the case due to the popularity of a) Paid apps, b) Free apps without ads, and c) Free apps with other ad networks’ ads.