[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

You make your points eloquently, EW, but the plain fact is that that ad-supported text has been around since the 19th C , in one form or another.Ad-supported magazines aren't going away anytime soon. The anamoly has been full-price,non-ad-supported novels , which weren't popular until well after WW2.

And have destroyed the ad-supported type. The ad-based print industries are dying. Magazine subscriptions & counter sales are shrinking, and advertising support for them is plummeting. There are increases in advertisements: in videos for online magazines. (Note that online mags with videos have found a substantial place in the market while "enhanced ebooks" have not. People don't want videos interrupting their novels.)

Wouldn't this also apply to games and apps? Yet there are ad-supported games and apps. I believe that you are exaggerating thhe technical difficulties of displaying ads.

I don't know of any modern black & white video game settings. What games are supposed to play on computers, tablets, phones and e-ink displays after a single purchase? I'm not sure there are any that are supposed to play on a phone or a computer equally well, and don't know if iPhone apps transfer to iPads. I thought they were different enough that they had to be redesigned--which meant different ads.

Ebooks, OTOH, are downloaded to device-of-your-choice; there's no spot that says "click here for the phone version, and over here for the laptop version, and use this one if you're reading on e-ink." (That'd rather kill the whole Kindle, "just open your book from whatever device you've got handy" approach.)

Now, I'm no techno geek (I wouldn't know a style sheet if it came up and bit me in the a$$) but it seems there is one type of ad that could work in this area-the simple, clickable text ad that Google uses. It would be unobstrusive and you put them in at regular intervals in the text. You would be able to put in quite a few of them- maybe as many as one per "page" (every 250-300 words or so. You click on them and you go to the company webpage. They wouldn't take you to the company web page if you weren't connected, but then, if you saw an ad you liked while you weren't connected, you could return to it later.

1) If they're underlined (or worse, highlighted), people will find an app to strip the underlining. Extra markup on the text counts as "extreme nuisance" for most readers. A lot of us strip out the underlining text on blogs that use keyword ads. If the code is hard to strip, people will just not buy those ebooks. It's *incredibly* disruptive to the reading process. Gmail's text ads are *not in the middle of the text.*

2) Not underlined = invisible; won't get seen; won't get clicked.

3) Nobody's going to return to an "ad they liked" in an ebook that was "an underlined word."

4) You're still not looking at the numbers: How much money are advertisers going to pay, to support the coding changes required in ebooks, and the right to be seen by ONE viewer? How much would you pay to have a link to your website-of-choice seen by ONE person?

THe good thing about this type ad is that it would work well across many different types of screens and even in e-ink. Now it wouldn't be a silver bullet, but there are no silver bullets.

Adverts don't need a "silver bullet," but they do need a way to convince advertisers that they're getting their money's worth. If the goal is to take a $12 ebook and sell it to customers for $6, and convince advertisers to pay the other $6, those advertisers will have to believe they'll be getting more than $6 in return somehow.

From one reader. Maybe from six readers... who share access to a single credit card.

This wouldn't work for the ad-hater, of course, so there would need to be both a full price, ad-free version and an ad-supported version, but if you use GMail, you could certainly read a novel with similar type ads without breaking out in spots.

Sure! A novel that put a single line of text ad in the top 5% of the screen would be fine! ... and after the first three pages I'd ignore it, just like I ignored headers in LRF ebooks.

Text ads are ubiquitous online because they're *cheap*. They're not paying for anything of substance; they're paying for the server drain of "free" services. The server drain per google search is, effectively, zero cost, but the server drain of ten million is noteworthy. Ads pay for that blip of not-quite-zero that the searches cost. If one person in a thousand clicks on an ad, and one in a thousand of those makes a purchase, the ad is probably profitable.

Ads that are intended to subsidize real purchases have to bring in real money. Advertisers aren't going to pay $1/reader for a single e-ink page somewhere in a novel, unless they believe that, on average, each reader will buy $1+ of goods or services from them.