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Overview on advertising in ebooks
July 21, 2009 | 11:18 am
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By Paul Biba
Advertising Age has a nice overview article on the current state of thinking about advertising in ebooks. You might want to take a look:
With print media in turmoil — or as one publishing executive put it, “The business is undergoing both a revolution and a depression” — digital players big and small are trying to find new business models with an eye to lowering the cost of books to consumers.
“There’s a movement in the industry to offset book prices through various ways,” said consultant Chris Andrews, who’s writing an e-book about the advent of e-books. “There’s more revenue per book with those ads and they allow publishers to sell the book less expensively. It also gives advertisers this cool market of people who spend hours with content. The relationship is longer than any other media — and it’s deeper.”
Others view in-book advertising as just one stop along a continuum of possibilities.
“They’re just exploring all the multiple ways you can monetize content, so you can offer a customer a full-priced book at $9.99 or you can offer them a half-priced book that’s partially underwritten by advertisers,” said Mark Coker, founder of e-book seller Smashwords.
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Comments:
I think it’s an idea worth looking into. Obviously, there’s the potential to go too far (as many e-book readers are understandably fearful of), but I think there is a workable format for e-book ads that would be reasonably unobtrusive and still useful to those who are interested. Ads should be targeted to the e-book’s content, and offer just a simple link, nothing fancy or multimedia… much like the Google Ads above this entry.
Ads make perfect sense for the Kindle both in itself and its iPhone app (and other mobile platform apps Amazon might release). The reason is that the continual connection allows the ads to refresh periodically — the space can be re-sold over and over.
Apps for the iPhone, the free or low-cost ones, are reporting revenues of $1000 or more per month for ads in their apps.
Kind of like radio, where you hear the same songs over and over, but the ads are new.
But we all hate ads in ‘books’ even though we accept them just fine in ‘magazines’ and ‘newspapers.’ Maybe in e-books too, I don’t know.
A lot depends on the obtrusiveness. I don’t want to have to negotiate past an ad at the end of every chapter of a Steven King thriller, for example. And I don’t want to see an ad pop up every time I open a book.
This would be an abomination. The inclusion of ads in ebooks is in no way tolerable. Not for free books, not for discounted books, not for any reason. I do not want to see ads at any time, any place, or for any product or service.
I can tolerate DRM. I can understand removing illegal ebooks. But if all ebooks had ads, it would be time to throw my Kindle in the trash.
I could deal with ads (for books, and books only) at the very ends of e-books (and NOWHERE else in them.) That would be like the pages in the backs of paperbacks that list recent books by the same publisher in the same genre–those are actually kind of useful and easy to ignore if you don’t want them.
Actually as regards Kindle in particular, if the end of the book included a link to buy the next book in the series, that would be very convenient. And a link to a page of books by the same author would be fine.
But the hour I encounter ads infesting the middle of my e-book is the hour I’m on the phone with Amazon, returning the book and getting my money back.
And the problem is, I think the kind of ads I’m describing are not the kind of ads that people pay big bucks to get put in books (thus subsidizing the book for the reader.) How much is a company willing to pay for one ad in one copy of one book? That, times the number of ads in the book, is the top limit on how much cheaper the book will be for the reader. Suppose companies will pay five cents per ad per copy of a book (which seems kind of high to me). To drop the price of the book by five dollars, you’d have to have a hundred ads in it. How could the formatting and layout crew insert that many ads without making the book a horrific experience for the reader? I’m having trouble imagining it myself.
I don’t like DRM. I strongly dislike the “big brother” attitude of removing already purchased books from Kindles. But obtrusive ads in my books would be absolutely, totally, the last straw.
Ads at the end, related to the content of the book (or other similar books) sounds reasonable to me too. I’d even be happy with links in the front to detailed ads in the back (considering some of the material I’ve encountered in e-books in front of the actual copy, a few ad links would be a pleasure!).
But I think simply dismissing the idea is the wrong way to go, especially at this stage of its not having been tried yet (and considering a similar tack was already done with paper books, and did not freak anyone out). Like so many things, sometimes you have to experiment to find out what works. You can’t do that if everyone simply refuses to even try. I’m all for trying. Then, if no one can figure out a way to make it work, ditch the idea and try something else.