When I use an ad-supported app (whether it is a game or any other kind) the only ad I ever see regards Babelgum Free TV. So I'm wondering how effective this method can be with just one sponsor. Does it depend from where I live? I'm italian (and the ad is in my language). Do you see more ads in the US or other countries?
I think it depends on the type of advertising. Some advertising in apps is static advertising. These ads are inserted into apps and are not dynamic. In other words they do not change unless they are specifically changed by the developer in an update to the app. Some advertising in apps is shown to you after it detects your location using Location Services in your iDevice's General Settings. So this would presumably show you apps that are in your local language and are targeted at people in your region/country. This would explain why you are seeing only the one ad over and over in different free ad supported apps. The apps are detecting your location and showing you ads that are targeted or flagged for your location. And from your description it may be that only one ad is targeted at anyone who is currently located in Italy. This is dynamic advertising because it will change when your location changes. It will also change when another developer signs up for advertising targeted to people in your region. I am not located in the US. I'm located in Australia and I used to see just a few different apps being advertised in these free ad supported apps. I would expect that someone located in the US would see many more apps being advertised. I've disabled Location Services on my iPhone because it was helping to drain my battery. One side-effect of disabling Location Services is that I no longer see many of the ads.
No, it depends on how the app has been programmed. In my experience some apps will ask you to turn Location Services on if it is switched off. But you don't have to and the apps still work just fine (they just don't display the ads and will sometimes ask you to turn on Location Services). And others don't ask and don't display the ads.
According to Apple guidelines, the app is supposed to ask you before it retrieves your GPS location. Most ad systems don't seem to do this, and they are all getting past Apple review, so I'm not sure if they've relaxed these requirements or if they're just not catching them. All ad systems that I know of use dynamic content, and usually it is tailored to your location. Most of the agreements are with advertisers in the US, so that's where you'll see the largest variety of ads. If they only have a few contracts in other countries, you'll see the same ad(s) repeating over and over. Really depends on the size of the company that the app is working with and how what types of agreements they have with their advertisers in various countries. Note that some ad frameworks also have provisions built in such that if they cannot connect to the ad server after some number of tries (to send back impressions/click-thrus and to fetch new ads) they will disable the app altogether. Usually this is up to the app developer to decide how they want to handle this situation.
As it fetches the advert from a server somewhere it can always use your IP to get a vague idea of where you are (certainly which country). It doesn't have to rely on GPS to get your location http://www.ip-adress.com/
