No Opt-Out For Ads On New Kindle Fires 383
An anonymous reader writes "Lost amid the announcements for Amazon's new tablets and e-readers was the news that their latest Kindle Fire tablets would include advertisements. So-called 'Special Offers' would place ads on the devices' lock screens in a similar fashion to the lowest price Kindle e-readers. However, on the e-readers, you had the option to 'buy out' the ads by simply paying the difference in price between the cheaper device and the regular version. But Amazon has no confirmed there is no way to opt out of the ads on the new Kindle Fire tablets."
Update: 09/09 03:02 GMT by S : Reader Aoreias sends words that Amazon has now changed its mind. A spokesman announced that users will have the ability to opt-out for a fee of $15.
Re:That will make the choice simpler (Score:3, Interesting)
Over the course of the last few days, Amazon has raised the price of the Nexus 7 in their store by up to $50 (it's only marked up $40 today) and stopped offering Prime shipping on it. Last week, I could pick one up for $199.99 and get free 2-day shipping on it. They now clearly want me to buy a Kindle Fire HD. Assholes.
I guess I'm going to my local Walmart and picking up a Nexus 7 now. Walmart, of all places!
Filter or modify the ads on your wi-fi network (Score:4, Interesting)
Has anyone analyzed the protocol that they use for advertising? How hard would it be to use a bogus DNS and serve your own ads, or to simply block them? Could a business with free public wi-fi set it up to serve ads for their business? Can I serve up ads for rooting your Kindle on my home network for any friends that visit?
Re:Will? (Score:5, Interesting)
Readers will hate this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Every time you stop reading for a while, an ad comes up. To get past the ad, you have to click a button. Then it talks to your wifi network and pops up the details of the ad. Then you can finally click again to get back to reading Pride and Prejudice.
That's totally unacceptable. It may well bomb, like binding ad cards into paperback books did in the 1970s and the 2000s.
Where does Amazon get off doing this? They're not the publisher. The device is paid for. The books are paid for.
Advertisers agree to honor DNT (Score:2, Interesting)
Advertisers agree to honor DNT only from browsers that display the setting behind a door labelled "beware leopard".
It's bullshit anyway - any standard based on advertisers behaving ethically is a nonstarter. Apple's default no-third-party cookies seems worthwhile, if circumventable. Why not do more of that? If there are Moz people working on the DNT standard, I feel like they are being suckered.
If it's google's display advertising business you're concerned with, I don't really understand your concerns. If it's any of the many less scrupulous parties that you are concerned with, they're just going to ignore DNT.
Re:That will make the choice simpler (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
No, common sense says that a device with these specs would cost more without the ads.
You're not an economist, are you? The price isn't set by the cost of production/distribution etc, it's set at the point expected to maximise revenue, and it's well established that increasing the price of a product can in some circumstances increase sales. Yes, no doubt Amazon expects its profits to be higher with the ads, but that probably has almost nothing at all to do with the price to the consumer.
Re:Expect more of the same (Score:4, Interesting)
At some point, I came to consider the ads as no different than your run-of-the-mill spammer - They go out of their way to waste my time, get me to look at their crap, try to con me into spending money, all on something in which I have no interest to start with. They fight back against ad-blocking technology with ever more subtle ways of getting around our filters, and yet they still can't take the goddamned hint.
What hint would that be, that you want the site to be run by magic pixies that don't have any server costs, don't have any bandwidth costs and don't have any costs creating the content? Most people hate pay-walls and subscriptions with a vengeance so you don't want to give them your money, you don't want to give them eyeball time, you should get the part that benefits you but they shouldn't get the part that benefits them. Nobody wants ads as such, if customers do it's so they can get more content or pay less. It used to be that if you don't like what they're offering, don't buy it. If you don't like all the ads on TV, don't watch it. If you don't like all the ads on a website, don't go there.
Ad blockers are part of a bigger cultural change which is "if you don't like the deal, rewrite it". Don't like all the ads on TV? Get a PVR to skip them. Don't like the web ads? Get an ad blocker to browse the site without them. Don't like the DRM on BluRays? Download it off TPB. It's like a boycott, except the hard part of forgoing something you actually wanted. And there's a lot of people out there that just aren't reasonable in what they want, but nobody's going to sell them a Ferrari for $100. In the digital world there's no limits though, if you don't feel paying a buck for Angry Birds is reasonable and want to pirate it for nothing then you can. And the more unreasonable you are, the more you can justify.