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Originally Posted by stonetools
I agree that this is the key point. Now I have no background in marketing, and possibly, EW, you do. I wonder how you can be so sure that ad support could not noticeably lower prices.
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Ad support *for text* has been tried, over and over, and every method attempted has had limited success. Ad-supported media that worked for decades are failing; the magazine and newspaper industries are on the verge of collapse because ad-supported production costs aren't working like they used to: people aren't buying the advertised products enough to make it worth buying space on the page. Methods that have been tried online have been more failworthy than most, as advertisers attempted to use the rules of print on a medium that isn't as fixed.
The loop with TV is more difficult to trace, but we're still starting to see it: more ads and more invasive ads, for which people keep seeking better blocking technology.
Ebooks, unlike magazines, aren't left on the counter and thumbed through again when a person is bored. Nobody (almost nobody?) is going to re-open them just to see the ads. There's no easy "flip to that page I saw with the striking picture of the woman on a cliff, what was that about again?" *Maybe* the publisher will bookmark the ads--and *maybe*the buyer will be comfortable using the software to navigate bookmarks.
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After all, it does so for games, TV shows, and apps, not to mention hardware like the KSO. Are you really trying to say that the ebook is the unique type of medium that ad support WOULDN'T lower prices for?
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I'm saying that attempts to *insert* ads in novels have been monumental flops. Releasing novels piecemeal worked for quite a while... but the magazines that did that, have failed or are failing. The short-story print market, wonderfully suited for ad support, has almost collapsed. Advertisers are not convinced (for perfectly good reasons) that the people buying the stories, are going to buy the products shown next to them.
This is made worse in ebooks by the lack of control of the appearance of the ad. Try telling an ad exec, "it'll cost you a quarter per ebook we sell to include your ad, and you don't get to choose whether it's seen in color or not, or whether it's seen on a Kindle or a computer screen or a tablet or a phone. Make something that's equally compelling on all those devices."
An ad at every chapter break is possible without destroying the reading experience. So, maybe 15-20 ads? Let's call it 20; we assume publishers will encourage at least that many chapters to get the maximum result from the adverts. If a normally-$10 ebook is going to sell for $5 for the ad-supported version, that's $.25 each from those advertisers.
If the book sells 10,000 copies, that's $2,500 from each advertiser.
Not many companies are going to deal with a CPM of $250. (I daresay, "none," because they don't even know when the ad will be viewed--if the book is bought & downloaded in April for a birthday, and not read for several months, the ad may no longer be relevant.)
Dynamic ad feeds could get around that problem--but limits the market to those people using cloud-based readers. That number is growing, but isn't everyone, and isn't likely to be. Do they just refuse to sell the book to people who don't have one of the approved devices? Sell it in the Sony store, but only to people with T1's or Daily editions, not to people with a 350?
Does the book not work if you're out of range when reading it? Get to chapter break, and it freezes until you get to a wifi spot?
The technical issues aren't insurmountable, but they're substantial, and advertisers aren't going to provide those answers. They're going to say, "how much will it cost us to have our ads seen by how many readers," and will agree to pay, or not, based on that answer.
Who do you think will be rewriting their firmware to force the readers to see ads they don't want? How will they manage to convince book buyers that the ads won't interfere with reading, but convince advertisers they'll increase sales?
The *easiest* way to put ads in ebooks is to sell them as individual apps: a package deal, book content & adverts all together, with whatever color, animation & sound the provider can put together to make the adverts interesting enough to not skip over.
...but then the market is just the app market, and they lose all those potential customers with e-ink readers, or who prefer ebooks on their computers.
"New James Patterson ebook: $12 at Amazon, or $6 app with ads for your iPad. But not for iPhones; for that, you need the $12 version."
Somehow, I don't see that being a successful sales pitch.