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Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Free *books*, with the nuisances you mention, would be popular. The question is whether the products would sell enough for advertisers to subsidize those books.
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Offhand, I'd bet No.
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Google ads work because millions of people see those ads; if a tiny fraction clicks on them, they're successful. A bestseller ebook gets, what, 20,000 viewers? Reading on different devices, some of which have no connectivity, many of whom won't be interested in the particular thing being advertised. If the bestseller, normally $15, is going to be *free*, that's a lot of sales to generate from a very tiny pool of viewers, compared to google or tv shows.
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Correct. Advertising is all about Cost Per Thousand views. Google does quite well because the costs are low and Google's search algorithms try to tie the ad to what you're reading at the moment, so there is some level of targeting the desired market with ads relevant to them.
I could easily turn off the text ads in GMail. I don't because they're non-intrusive, relevant more often than not, and sometimes merely whimsical.
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Has all the same nuisance problems, plus the fact that short stories get fewer sales. (The big publishers haven't yet figured out that ebooks can be any length, and they could sell individual short stories.)
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Oh, they're likely aware of it. But they won't because they couldn't make enough money to justify doing it. Publishers issue short stories as part of collections if at all, and the author has to be established as a novelist before a short fiction collection is likely to be issued.
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Dennis