Quote:
Originally Posted by Hyde
This is what happened to Hulu. When is started it was the greatest thing since sliced bread; watch your tv and you get like 2 commercials during the whole show and they are 7-10 seconds long.
Now you watch Hulu and there are almost as many commercial breaks as live tv, there are 2 commercials every break and they are around 19-23 seconds long, and you can't even fast forward. But the killer is they are too short to do anything (go to the bathroom/kitchen).
I bet Amazon has a similar plan.. throw a little animated gif in the middle of your book when you have been reading x amount of time. Not at first mind you, but after the ad versions have become popular. And let others pay for the ad-free versions (Hulu Plus).
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I may not be cynical enough, but I would be
astonished if Amazon did something that stupid. A book is not a movie. There's no precedent for that kind of interruption in a book. At least with Hulu you have the precedent of commercials on TV. (And I don't actually find Hulu's commercials that egregious. 30 seconds of commercial time beats the 2-3 minutes of commercial time we're usually subjected to.) I can't think of anything that would kill their "special offer" program faster than to dump ads directly into books.
You have to remember: People already have Kindles. If they have any hope at all at getting upgraders, the Kindles actually have to be
upgrades. The ad-supported Kindle they're offering now is for people who haven't jumped on board yet. That's almost certainly as intrusive as they can get without making the reading experience suffer. Put ads directly in the books, and you'll push users to one of the competing e-readers.
If they want to go the free route, they can have an ISP or a wireless provider give away the Wifi or 3G versions on contract, but I think if they have any brains at all (which they do seem to have) they'll do just about anything else before they put ads directly in the books.