Quote:
Originally Posted by anamardoll
I just don't see people being willing to put up with that in books. TV commercials are acceptable because - hey, bathroom break. Reading commercials? I just don't see it.
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TV commercials are acceptable because they're *entertaining.* Ditto magazine ads; they're made to be visually appealing and intriguing. TV ads are designed to be informative and attention-grabbing--and (and here's a *big* aspect we've been skipping over)--they're aimed at a target demographic. Cartoons at 3pm get very different ads from the same cartoons at 11pm.
Nobody's sorted out how to aim ads at book readers. (Much less ebook readers.) Everyone knows romances are popular; they don't know what else romance readers buy. (Well. Amazon has some good guesses... but they're likely to run into consumer privacy laws if they aren't careful. And a shift in state laws in a few places could make them unable to target ads to individual readers.) And even Amazon has some problems--their "put other family members on your Kindle account" approach means up to 6 people's reading preferences are going through one name.
Text-based ads at the chapter breaks, based on chapter keywords, on a wifi-enabled device, might work, like google text ads. And be about as effective, which means advertisers might be willing to pay $.10 per clickthrough... which means maybe $.10 per book. Useless for subsidizing costs.
Visually appealing ads need to be tailored to the device. It's possible to make stunning black-and-white ads--but they won't compete with color ads on color devices. And the ads that will look great on a 6" screen will be unreadable on an iphone.