[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by stonetools

One person says why ebook ads will succeeed where printads won't:



LINK

Yeah, that guy doesn't do a great job of making his case. Specifically, he claims:

Today, ads can be served up on demand, and delivered in ebooks and apps based on the location of the reader, his/her profile information, purchase history, browsing behavior, and other factors.

Gone are the mysteries that accompanied old school, in-book advertising. Advertisers will no longer have to settle for ambiguous measurements and buying ads on a hunch. When they place ads in ebooks and apps, advertisers will be able to tell how many people interacted with their ads (and how many didn't), how long they spent viewing them, on what devices, what they were reading, and where they were located (geographically) when they encountered the ad. They'll also be able to know who -- exactly -- saw their ad (and who didn't) and be able to create engaging, interactive ads that lure readers in and encourage them to provide additional information about themselves and their interests.

Publishers will be able to deliver location and context-aware content (including advertisements) in ebooks and apps that are targeted to the unique characteristics of the consumer. This means that publishers will be able to sell a new breed of personalized advertisements (and generate new streams of recurring revenue) by moving advertisers away from the "spray and pray" approach that has dominated the advertising industry for decades. And, it means that advertisers will be able to gain in depth information about their prospects that was previously impossible to obtain.

This is basically BS. Amazon isn't going to share any of this information with publishers, neither is Apple. Nor, I suspect will B&N or anyone else. This "in depth information" simply won't be available.

And, as per my earlier post, even at 10 times the going rate for website ads (which do incorporate a certain amount of information about people viewing the ads, albeit not as much as could perhaps be gleaned from my Amazon account) this is not a sustainable model. And all of the in depth information on my purchasing habits still won't make an ad in a novel I happen to be reading as relevant as an ad for a plasma TV that is placed on a website for people interested in purchasing plasma TVs.

I think the ad haters have two problems.

I think your constant reliance on ad hominem arguments - whether characterizing people who disagree with you as "ad-haters" or people who agree with you as "wise authors" or "wise businessmen" shows the absence of any real evidence on your part.

Why not stop the name calling and address the substance?

Without a concrete example of a model, I'm not sure there is much point in further discussion, really. When the ad-haters think of an ad supported model, they immediately think of the worst ads they've ever seen and can't imagine anyone would want anything like thing to sully their pure novel reading experience, which has always been ad-free (except where it was'nt). They then think up every reason why ad support won't work, although ad support seems to work in every other type of media.

No, there have been plenty of substantive reasons put forth by "ad-haters" about why this wouldn't work.

Whether ad support will work in ebooks is really going to depend on its implementation, not on abstract discussion on why ads will never work in ebooks. Ads were never supposed to work on ebook readers either-until they did.

A lot of the discussion, as mentioned above, has been quite concrete. Feel free to offer your own concrete examples, preferably with numbers.