This move is sure to upset the Hacker News and tech enthusiast crowds. After all, who wants to pay full price for a product that continues to deliver ads to you? The tacit contract across the web is that free == ad supported, while paid == no ads.
However, I'm not so sure if the average consumer (the target audience for the Kindle) will even think twice about this. Consider cable TV; People happily pay for cable TV subscriptions which still include commercial ads. They (arguably) don't get in the way of the end-user experience, yet they subsidize the costs for TV programming. Likewise, the ads on the Kindle are limited to the lock screen and kept out of the way of the actual user experience.
Also note that Amazon has deliberately chosen to not offer a higher-priced version without ads. Without an option to pay more to remove ads, the consumer will never have to debate whether or not the annoyance of the ads is worth $30 dollars to them. Instead, the ads become a fact of life and are accepted without question by the end users. Even better, it widens the Kindle advertising demographic to include those with the most disposable income who would otherwise pay to remove the ads. Smart move.
A few years ago I was absolutely positive that the Chromebooks would be $50 and mostly ad-supported. When they turned out to be $300 with no forced ads I was shocked and totally turned off the idea. Cheap computing with ads seems like a pretty solid model for vendors going forward (well, not MS or Apple) and I'm surprised it has taken this long to really get going.
A lot of the PC users I deal with believe if a device is showing you ads, then it has a virus. Computing devices are pretty much in the same category as other electronics for a lot of people. I pay for it, I don't want to see ads.
An interesting approach might have been adwords for apps.
Apple came out with "get users comfortable paying for apps & take a 30% cut" model which suits them as a company. But, realistically a lot of apps don't make their money from directly selling the app.
A lot of apps might be willing to bid against each other for users. I'm not sure how big a market this is but it could be substantial.
The ad-supported price is not really the full price if you can pay $30 post-purchase to disable the ads, is it?
Sounds like instead of selling two flavors up front (ad-supported and no-ads for $30 more) they've just pushed the second option behind the purchase barrier.
I'm confused, where do you see an option to pay $30 post-purchase to disable the ads? The previous model offered this as an option, but one of the points from the article was that they've haven't announced any such offer for this generation's model.
It's not really "full price" when a "retina display" tablet with 32 GB of storage goes for half the amount the same storage iPad goes for ($300 vs $600).
I remember a day when cable tv had no commercials. You paid, as opposed to programs coming in over the air, and therefor didn't need to see commercials.
I think the slight difference is that, in the case of cable TV you have to endure the commercials until they finish to access the content that interests you. In this particular case of the Kindle, ads are only on the lock screen and you simply need to unlock the device to access the content. Not as intrusive or dominating, a bit more tolerable. Of course, having the option to turn them off permanently is always nice.
My guess is Amazon will later offer an option to remove the ads. Amazon will gladly trade $40 in cash today to lose $30 in future ad revenue and satisfy a customer's wishes. They just didn't announce this upfront because they want the headline price be $199, rather than have the media say stuff like it is $240 compared to the $199 google tablet.
I think Amazon could make more money by offering an option to disable the ads for $x. Whoever is willing to pay is likely not someone to click on the ads anyway, but they avoid upsetting people who don't want to rent out their eyeballs.
In theory they could put whatever they want there, but I guess they will keep it low profile. Like related books, games and appliances that are relevant to your amazon profile.
Question now is if other tablet manufacturers have to go ad-supported in order to compete or if they'll play the "no ads here" card.
With the Kindle Touch if I leave wireless off; which is perfect okay for an e-reader; I do not get ads after awhile. Granted with the new Fires your not going to want to go that route.
I never did figure out why Amazon loaded me down with baby ads one week. From newborn's clothing to pampers ads. I have never ordered the like and nothing in my immediate future trends that way. When it is working I tend to see more books than anything else on the sleep screen.
I have a current gen Kindle Touch Ad-Supported version. The ads are displayed in two places:
1. When the Kindle is switched off, there is a full screen ad. They're mostly for books (sometimes audio books) or some sort of local special offer. Sometimes they just give you a heads up about an amazon sale.
2. When the kindle is switched ON and you are on the main navigational screen: There's a very small ad at the bottom of the screen. Clicking it will switch to the full screen view of the ad to give you more information.
No ads are currently displayed in the middle of your books nor do they interrupt the flow of what you're doing.
So long as they stay the same way in Paperwhite then I'll be fine with it. I barely pay them any attention anyway.
Maybe most of the market doesn't care, but I care a lot. I gladly paid $30 more for an ad-free Kindle, and I won't be buying one of the new Fires if they don't have an ad-free version.
One interesting question is whether or not Google will respond by adding an ad-supported component to their tablet ecosystem.
As a technical matter, I don't think it would be hard (for instance) to add Gmail ads to the Gmail app. And I'd think those ads wouldn't bother people much since they're used to them on the web. The real questions are whether or not the math works out and whether or not people would go for it (they way they apparently have with Amazon).
It is an interesting choice. There was a time when every television you bought was a conduit of ads. Think about that for a minute, here you had companies like GE, Panasonic, Toshiba, Magnavox, selling you this television for some price, and the only content you could get for it had un-skippable advertising injected several times an hour. There was no 'rev share' agreement with the TV manufacturers, they had to live or die on their hardware margins.
I ordered the Kindle Fire HD 32gig yesterday. I am considering cancelling it due to the ads for one major reason, battery life, and other reasons.
I don't want anything displayed when I lock it. I want it off. I also don't want anything displayed when I turn it on, I want instant access to my stuff.
I'm not a fan of Apple products, but I know the iPad is good for $600 (32gig version), so I feel like the price differential is somewhat reduced by ads, and I'm still taking on the risk of ending up with something like the original fire. ($240 difference)
I wish Amazon had shown a price to remove the ads along with the release and also showed an exact demo of how they work.
When they said customers are buying the best tablet, they really aren't if it has ads. Rather I am buying a lower end, ad supported tablet. From a marketing perspective, they signal low quality, rather than high quality to the customer.
You are making a lot of assumptions about how Amazon implemented ads. I would be VERY surprised if they kept the screen on after locking just to display an ad, especially when battery life is such an important metric for tablets.
Also, many other comments (and people I know) have indicated that the ad experience on the Kindle is "nice" because the ads are usually actually coupons. If the ads on the Fire turned out to be Amazon Deals, that could be a handy feature.
It doesn't seem unreasonable to assume the lock screen is only shown shortly after locking and right before waking up, like every other tablet. (And for the e-ink Kindles, it doesn't seem like much of an issue. E-ink devices already all use screensavers AFAIK and still get months of battery life.)
I think that this is both a smart move on the part of Amazon, and also a portent of bad things to come in general. One of the ideas behind the tablet 'ecosystem' in general (at least the one spawned by Apple), is to control the vision and view of your computing experience. Given that standard 'workstation' type computers are historically more free-form in how they allow you to access them and work with them compared to tablets, I suppose forcing ads upon the users was the next logical step for the structured tablet platforms.
I wonder more generally if this is the first shot across the bow and it's something we will see from Apple and Google in the future. I think the question at that point is also... how soon until the new Kindle gets rooted and these ads blocked ;).
I have one of the ad-supported Kindle e-readers and I can say that at first I thought I would be annoyed by them but it turned out that most of the ads were actually coupons. There was one to get a kindle case at 50% retail, which I used. Many others were good deals like that. When I was using it I found myself actually reviewing the ad on the screensaver before I turned it off to see if I liked the deal or not.
I wonder if the ads on the Fire will come from the Amazon daily deal site or other special offers rather than just banner ads like you'd see on a website.
I've said many times before that I will never buy another non-ad-supported Kindle as long as they're available. While the price going down is nice (not that it's much), what's more important to me is that the ads are actually good! I've gotten quite a few deals on books (e.g. $0.99 book deals not available to non-ad Kindle owners), probably close to $20 off on Amazon MP3, and quite a few other things I'm forgetting. They're not remotely obtrusive and they add value for me; I really can't see any downside whatsoever.
I'm glad I read this: I pre-ordered the ad version yesterday unawares, and just cancelled my order and re-ordered with the extra no-ad tax. My ship date slipped by 10 days sadly.
I have both ad supported and non-ad supported Kindles. The DX is not ad supported, and its screensaver is an ugly picture of an author. There seem to be about 10 of these, which it scrolls through. Those pictures are not settable by the user, and get awfully, awfully boring.
I prefer the ad supported one, at least you get new screensaver pictures once in a while.
There's a peevish backlash against advertising that permeates a lot of our culture and especially places like HN[1]. Some of it is founded, especially in older times, when it literally meant (paraphrasing PG) that you are subjected to X amount of abuse for Y amount of content. Some platforms are still like that (TV - for instance advertising tampons to me, is a little silly), but a lot (Google, Amazon, Netflix) aren't.
I think in the backlash I often see there's some discomforting thing that people want to express, as if we feel like like we're being had by advertising. It certainly feels that way during the political campaign, and I can sympathize.
But on the other hand advertising has certainly helped me out and I can even remember some very real examples. I had no idea the new intel chipset was out until an ad pointed it out. I had no idea that certain clothing and furniture brands existed until ads pointed them out. I had no idea Honda remade the Honda Elite moped in 2010 until an ad pointed that out. All of these were really useful to me, and all of them eventually lead me to buying something.
I bought all these things but I don't feel like I've been had. Both the products and the advertisements provided a lot of utility. We don't know what we don't know, as Donald Rumsfeld poetically said. Sometimes advertising can do the good of filling that gap. They deserve that much.
Some of the best books I've ever read were not recommended to me by my friends, who, if they share my tastes in books, only share them incidentally. Amazon on the other hand has done something great and given me real, concrete suggestions (read: advertisements) supported by the data I've given them whilst buying and browsing.
We have to give them at least a little credit. Advertising, especially for Google/Amazon/Netflix, is solving real problems for both the companies and the consumers.
[1] Stories that bubble to the top have titles like "work on something real, not ads" and remind me of phrases like "real women have curves". Both of which seem unnecessarily narrow and just plain mean to me.
But on the other hand advertising has certainly helped me out and I can even remember some very real examples. I had no idea the new intel chipset was out until an ad pointed it out. I had no idea that certain clothing and furniture brands existed until ads pointed them out. I had no idea Honda remade the Honda Elite moped in 2010 until an ad pointed that out. All of these were really useful to me, and all of them eventually lead me to buying something.
I have an ad-supported Kindle, and the ads are not terribly annoying. But they're kind of stupid.
Amazon knows who I am, and knows how to provide recommendations, but all I see are ads for crap I will likely never care about.
OK, so why can't ads be optional then? If you want the benefits, then you just "turn on" ads (=helpful suggestions).
If ads are beneficial why would they charge you extra to turn them "off"? Under your reasoning, we should be paying extra to see ads, because we'd get helpful suggestions.
His point there was that not all ads are evil. As someone who has purchased things based off of Facebook ads that I've seen, I share his "lack of hatred" for ads, provided they're not annoying or malicious. If they keep services I like free or cheaper as a result of their existence, then I'm not going to complain about them too much.
Your last sentence is intriguing. Do you believe that ads are the only means to keep services "free" or "cheaper"?
If you do, then that would explain why you have come to accept them as "necessary" for services to be "free" or "cheap". (i.e., you've made a causal link between ads and "free/cheap")
If you don't, then I have more questions for you to answer.
Some people are determined to never see any ads. I kind of understand that - having an ad for smileys that shouts "HELLO" if you accidentally mouse over it is infuriating. Some ads are obnoxious, or are vectors for malware, or are just very slow. And even if they're not malware, nor obnoxious, nor slow, they're often not at all relevant.
This, coupled with no other way to pay for content, (and perhaps a refusal from many people to pay for content) means that ads are a frustrating experience even for someone like me who is pretty ad tolerant.
Some people genuinely enjoy goodrelevant ads, and would be happy to have those displayed to them. And some of the people who hate ads would gladly pay to have ads removed.
Much worse that those ads though is the pollution of WWW space with vapid, empty, useless corporate sites that are just huge ads, and which do nothing to give me useful information. Combine that with Google's preference for some domains and web searching is a horrible experience now.
And using Google as a reference tool means you'll have weeks of ads served based on the one query you made to discover what a Widget is used for.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadHowever, I'm not so sure if the average consumer (the target audience for the Kindle) will even think twice about this. Consider cable TV; People happily pay for cable TV subscriptions which still include commercial ads. They (arguably) don't get in the way of the end-user experience, yet they subsidize the costs for TV programming. Likewise, the ads on the Kindle are limited to the lock screen and kept out of the way of the actual user experience.
Also note that Amazon has deliberately chosen to not offer a higher-priced version without ads. Without an option to pay more to remove ads, the consumer will never have to debate whether or not the annoyance of the ads is worth $30 dollars to them. Instead, the ads become a fact of life and are accepted without question by the end users. Even better, it widens the Kindle advertising demographic to include those with the most disposable income who would otherwise pay to remove the ads. Smart move.
// a humorous take http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2011/04/13
While you see them as thin clients I presume?
Apple came out with "get users comfortable paying for apps & take a 30% cut" model which suits them as a company. But, realistically a lot of apps don't make their money from directly selling the app.
A lot of apps might be willing to bid against each other for users. I'm not sure how big a market this is but it could be substantial.
Sounds like instead of selling two flavors up front (ad-supported and no-ads for $30 more) they've just pushed the second option behind the purchase barrier.
I wish it were still this way.
In theory they could put whatever they want there, but I guess they will keep it low profile. Like related books, games and appliances that are relevant to your amazon profile.
Question now is if other tablet manufacturers have to go ad-supported in order to compete or if they'll play the "no ads here" card.
I never did figure out why Amazon loaded me down with baby ads one week. From newborn's clothing to pampers ads. I have never ordered the like and nothing in my immediate future trends that way. When it is working I tend to see more books than anything else on the sleep screen.
1. When the Kindle is switched off, there is a full screen ad. They're mostly for books (sometimes audio books) or some sort of local special offer. Sometimes they just give you a heads up about an amazon sale.
2. When the kindle is switched ON and you are on the main navigational screen: There's a very small ad at the bottom of the screen. Clicking it will switch to the full screen view of the ad to give you more information.
No ads are currently displayed in the middle of your books nor do they interrupt the flow of what you're doing.
So long as they stay the same way in Paperwhite then I'll be fine with it. I barely pay them any attention anyway.
Here's an example of how they currently look: http://cdn2.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/2268850/kindle-t...
http://cdn1.sbnation.com/entry_photo_images/2268908/kindle-t...
(The above images were taken from http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/14/2559732/kindle-touch-revi...)
As a technical matter, I don't think it would be hard (for instance) to add Gmail ads to the Gmail app. And I'd think those ads wouldn't bother people much since they're used to them on the web. The real questions are whether or not the math works out and whether or not people would go for it (they way they apparently have with Amazon).
I don't want anything displayed when I lock it. I want it off. I also don't want anything displayed when I turn it on, I want instant access to my stuff.
I'm not a fan of Apple products, but I know the iPad is good for $600 (32gig version), so I feel like the price differential is somewhat reduced by ads, and I'm still taking on the risk of ending up with something like the original fire. ($240 difference)
I wish Amazon had shown a price to remove the ads along with the release and also showed an exact demo of how they work.
When they said customers are buying the best tablet, they really aren't if it has ads. Rather I am buying a lower end, ad supported tablet. From a marketing perspective, they signal low quality, rather than high quality to the customer.
Also, many other comments (and people I know) have indicated that the ad experience on the Kindle is "nice" because the ads are usually actually coupons. If the ads on the Fire turned out to be Amazon Deals, that could be a handy feature.
If they are displaying on the lock screen, how else would it work? I admit I am making an assumption, but I can't think of another way it would work.
I wonder more generally if this is the first shot across the bow and it's something we will see from Apple and Google in the future. I think the question at that point is also... how soon until the new Kindle gets rooted and these ads blocked ;).
I wonder if the ads on the Fire will come from the Amazon daily deal site or other special offers rather than just banner ads like you'd see on a website.
I do agree with the parent though, ads on the screen don't bother me at all.
http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/07/amazon-confirms-yes-you-c...
I prefer the ad supported one, at least you get new screensaver pictures once in a while.
I think in the backlash I often see there's some discomforting thing that people want to express, as if we feel like like we're being had by advertising. It certainly feels that way during the political campaign, and I can sympathize.
But on the other hand advertising has certainly helped me out and I can even remember some very real examples. I had no idea the new intel chipset was out until an ad pointed it out. I had no idea that certain clothing and furniture brands existed until ads pointed them out. I had no idea Honda remade the Honda Elite moped in 2010 until an ad pointed that out. All of these were really useful to me, and all of them eventually lead me to buying something.
I bought all these things but I don't feel like I've been had. Both the products and the advertisements provided a lot of utility. We don't know what we don't know, as Donald Rumsfeld poetically said. Sometimes advertising can do the good of filling that gap. They deserve that much.
Some of the best books I've ever read were not recommended to me by my friends, who, if they share my tastes in books, only share them incidentally. Amazon on the other hand has done something great and given me real, concrete suggestions (read: advertisements) supported by the data I've given them whilst buying and browsing.
We have to give them at least a little credit. Advertising, especially for Google/Amazon/Netflix, is solving real problems for both the companies and the consumers.
[1] Stories that bubble to the top have titles like "work on something real, not ads" and remind me of phrases like "real women have curves". Both of which seem unnecessarily narrow and just plain mean to me.
I have an ad-supported Kindle, and the ads are not terribly annoying. But they're kind of stupid.
Amazon knows who I am, and knows how to provide recommendations, but all I see are ads for crap I will likely never care about.
Your argument makes little sense.
If you do, then that would explain why you have come to accept them as "necessary" for services to be "free" or "cheap". (i.e., you've made a causal link between ads and "free/cheap")
If you don't, then I have more questions for you to answer.
This, coupled with no other way to pay for content, (and perhaps a refusal from many people to pay for content) means that ads are a frustrating experience even for someone like me who is pretty ad tolerant.
Some people genuinely enjoy good relevant ads, and would be happy to have those displayed to them. And some of the people who hate ads would gladly pay to have ads removed.
Much worse that those ads though is the pollution of WWW space with vapid, empty, useless corporate sites that are just huge ads, and which do nothing to give me useful information. Combine that with Google's preference for some domains and web searching is a horrible experience now.
And using Google as a reference tool means you'll have weeks of ads served based on the one query you made to discover what a Widget is used for.
The new KF will undoubtedly ship with a locked bootloader that checks ROM signatures and clobbers any unauthorized ROMs on startup.