Amazon Underground
amazon.com
amazon.com
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do...
"Interstitial Advertisements
When a user launches an Amazon Underground app for the first time, a welcome message in the form of an interstitial ad plays. In subsequent times that a user either launches or resumes the app, paid interstitial ads will also sometimes play."
Interesting. So amazon deals with putting in the ads and the app dev gets paid for every minute the app is used. Seems like an interesting idea, probably useful for games that are very engaging (read: time drain)
When you download an app in the app store it says "free" not "free with ads" because you don't have to pay any money for it. It's still, technically, free.
It's pretty obvious in the documentation and on every page except for the original product announcement that it's ad supported, but I don't expect Amazon to use a bunch of their 200-word product announcement to justify why there are ads.
The important point is that it's free, meaning I don't pay for it with dollars. When is the last time a free product shouted "BTW it's only free because of ads?!" I felt like it was implied, and I don't expect marketing to be like, "And here are the tradeoffs you have to make and that you might not like." When you download an app from the current app store (Apple or Google) it says "Free," even if the app includes ads.
I don't feel slighted one bit.
If you want to repurpose the word to mean "free with no ads" you can do that, but you can't expect others to hold to that definition.
"Free" and "ad-supported" mean completely different things, and always have done.
"Free" in the context Amazon is using it (what Richard Stallman would refer to as Gratis) means that I do not have to pay money for something. That is a literal economic/dictionary definition.
Therefore, ad-supported in this context is a subset of "Free," as is any other form of non-monetary subsidization. So long as the end user is not paying, it is free.
The Free Software Foundation is free, but not ad-supported (though it strives to be free both in the sense "libre" (open/available) and "gratis" (not costing dollars).
If you show ads you're costing your users brain cycles and creating distraction and friction. The cost isn't monetary, but it's still a real indirect cost.
If it wasn't a real cost, ad-blockers would hardly be as popular as they are - and the ad industry wouldn't be quite so worried about them.
IMO the idea that anyone can believe the two models are identical from the user's point of view is not encouraging.
It's not free if I have to spend time servicing your revenue stream, unless you reimburse me at my market rate for my time that you spent/wasted.
To act like that is not a real cost is...baffling.
wut?
The way Amazon is using "free" the definition means that you don't pay money for it. Full stop.
There are other ways of calculating what your "costs" are, such as including opportunity cost (what you're referring to as "time wasted." If you use that definition of "free," literally nothing is ever free, as you're always forgoing something else.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/26/amazon-underground-is-an-an...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/amazons-new-games-and-...
[3] http://www.engadget.com/2015/08/26/amazon-underground-free-a...
[4] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2490149,00.asp
[5] http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/26/9210071/amazon-underground...
Ars mentioned there are ads in the Underground app itself, but didn't mention anything about ads being added to apps. Techcrunch only mentions ads in explaining how previous app revenue models used banner ads. The Verge doesn't mention ads at all. Embarrassing.
The ads look like a way to defray that cost.
I wonder what Samsung will try to do. Something similar or something from out of their own playbook?
The promise is that there will be no payments for the app or for in-app purchases. Also, I've spent some time playing Angry Birds through Underground, and the ads seem much more unobtrusive compared to getting the "freemium" app through Google Play. I guess the philosophy is similar to the "Special Offers" on the Kindle e-book readers.
Except if you can buy the virtual currency + goods without any real consequences you will be able to quickly explore everything grinding games have to offer.
Besides that, the Kindle Fire is a fundamentally useless device for kids. The kid mode was so buggy as to be useless. Take more than a few minutes of video and the wifi won't work. Some bug about if the disk is full wifi fails to work. There's just about no way to get the videos off the device, and no way for kids to do it. Download 2 movies? The wifi stops working. Install an app? 80% of the time, it never shows up in the menu.
The entire experience was stunningly bad. Amazon's entire Android device category is garbage. People complain about the extensions to Android by Samsung, etc, but honestly at least those other companies don't fundamentally ruin the device.
It just seems like a much more civil relationship.
There are a handful of interesting paid apps that are very short, unique experiences - which don't try to drag out the game to keep you playing it every day for months.
Its already getting harder and harder to actually sell/buy apps for money upfront, and this seems like it will make it even harder. And while I seem to be in a tiny minority of 'app' consumers, that is still my preferred method of obtaining new applications.
I would be in this minority as well. Generally, the cost for a good app is so negligible it's not even worth the time to try it beforehand. I paid roughly $5 for a full FTP/SFTP client on my phone. The free version offers 90% of the functionality.
I don't understand the appeal of leasing software.
The same thing could have been said about streaming music services and yet many artists seem not too happy about the per play $ they get from Spotify & ilk (though they are probably bound to say that regardless to some extent)
1) High quality games that are meant to be completed quickly will make less money relative to poor quality games that stretch out gameplay.
2) Developers become incentivized to stretch out gameplay to increase revenue.
3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play games.
All that aside, this is an interesting idea. I could see episodic games particularly benefiting from this model -- so long as they don't fall into the trap of stretching out gameplay to increase revenue.
> 3) Amazon Underground is covering the costs for now. But if users were asked to pay themselves, I'm sure many would balk at the idea of paying per-minute to play games.
As I understand it, it's not a pay-per-minute sort of deal. You'd pay the same price every month and the revenue would be divied out based on usage (like Netflix).
- Traditional TV has fixed length programming windows. No station is going to pay you more if you turn your 30 minute show into a 35 minute show. - However, you might get more money by turning your (25 minutes of content + 5 minutes of ads) show into a (22 minutes of content + 8 minutes of ads) show.
- And, setting up your show to end on a cliff-hanger and encourage viewers to come back next week is great for audience and therefore revenue. That's not "milking the audience" but it is structuring the system/content to maximise revenue.
- TV Content Producers are not generally paid "per minute" but according to its popularity with target demographics. That leads to trying to get more overall audience, rather than just more time. That will be true for underground as well, and it will certainly be the case that content producers will want as many users as possible to use their app as often as possible. But, the economics are such that for a lot of apps, getting existing users to consume for longer is a cheaper avenue than getting new users.
- That said, TV producers often try to spin-off new shows form old ones in order to get more airtime (& more dollars) for a brand. The TV industry graveyard is full of lessons like "Joanie loves Chachi". We similar stories in the app world, expect more of them.
The parent comment isn't FUD in any sense of the word.
Everything gdeglin said is true - just like in-app purchases have encouraged a whole genre of games where you pay to escape the grind, earn-per-minute games are likely to produce an equivalent genre of "just make that cut-scene run for 15 seconds longer" games.
Follow the money. If content producers are paid per minute consumed, then the owners of many of the game publishers will start making decisions that stretch the same amount of actual game play into a longer interaction.
It changes things slightly, but I think the issue remains. As you say, the problem certainly exists on television. Most shows do have lots of filler content in addition to frequent advertisements, and the ones that don't often require a more expensive subscription.
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Amazon-Underground/dp/B004G...
"The FTC’s longstanding guidance to companies is that disclosures in their ads should be close to the claims to which they relate – not hidden or buried in unrelated details – and they should appear in a font that is easy to read and in a shade that stands out against the background. Disclosures for television ads should be on the screen long enough to be noticed, read, and understood, and other elements in the ads should not obscure or distract from the disclosures."
Every once in a while, the FTC does clamp down on this.[1]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/09/opera...
I bought this and played it for about an hour to completion. For my hour, I'd have made them $0.12. Instead, I paid $4.64.
So for them to get to the same profit using this model, they'd have to attract $4.62/$0.12 = 38 times more users. i.e instead of having 1000+ downloads, they'd need to be in the 38k+ downloads range and for everyone to have played it to completion.
I see two problems for this particular game. 1. Fighting fantasy based games are a niche market so is there going to be a large enough user base to support this? 2. I'd say that the length of a typical gamebook shouldn't be more than 1-2 hours as it will get very complex. So they're kind of capped re per player usage.
Since it's a niche market, I don't imagine there would be hundreds of thousands of people trying this out for 5 minutes each.
Also, there's the niche issue: it's very possible that fighting fantasy fans are more likely to pay for their apps, which means none of these numbers applies to them.
I hope this doesn't become a trend, like using a picture of laminate flooring as a website background was a number of years back.
There's probably plenty of other reasons people can give for why plaintext is better.
I wish people wouldn't do this. It's not even necessary to get the desired effect. CSS has had rotation, custom fonts, custom backgrounds and such for a long time.
I'm too lazy to check: Does Amazon say what private info is collected? Info on phones can be much more personal and more accessible to other applications.
http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-com-Amazon-Underground/dp/B004G...
Thanks to mkaziz above for the link, apologies for the repetition
I'm feeling a bit sad that I'm overjoyed to hear that this category exists.
Paid, Free, Actually free
I like how they explain up-front that they pay the authors instead of perhaps another hidden payment model within 'Actually free' that ends up charging users.
Everyone with an app store wants to own the app store market. It is a land-grab to establish a monopoly.
Amazon has to be worried about this because if you own the app store, you choose the default way that people read books on the device. Which means that they can cut Amazon out of the book-selling business to that person.
Amazon doesn't want that. So they have been trying to make the Kindle work. And to install their bookstore as an app. And to try to make their app store viable. And so on.
It is all a long-term play to be in a position to not lose a core business when everyone switches to reading on devices.
Which is why there is an Android version of this, and no iOS version.
As a result, my former department, to this day, uses a Hightail (formerly, YouSendIt) dropbox as its only means by which customers can deliver files to the support and quality assurance teams.
Well, doesn't Amazon have a philosophy that ALL interaction between departments must be via services?
Oh here we go: https://amazon.com/gp/mas/get/android?dl=1
Take off the ?dl for a better splash page http://amazon.com/gp/mas/get/android
always online? Must the apps be used online, for monitoring usage and downloading ads - or can they be run offline, with the Amazon appstore app uploading stats/downloading ads when connected? (I ask this because I run games in "airport mode" and "stop" them afterwards, as a security measure, having been burned).
I don't think Amazon would want to launch a product dependent on JailBreaking. Unless Apple is forced to provide an API for alternative app stores, I can't see this ever being allowed. Unless of course apple rips off the idea and does it themselves.
On the other hand, apple could just throw more money into securing the phones from jailbreaking and end the business model much easier.
1. Allow installs from unknown sources 2. Download and install apk.
Can't do that on iOS without jailbreaking.
> 2.25 Apps that display Apps other than your own for purchase or promotion in a manner similar to or confusing with the App Store will be rejected
[0] https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
Smart play. It's definitely disruptive...
Tempted to uninstall them all...except the Kindle.
But don't look at that! Free shiny! Pay no attention to the virus behind the curtain.
I have some paid and freemium puzzle apps on Amazon and Play that would fit this model well, because they don't currently have ads, large numbers of people play them for free without ever buying, and the puzzles take 10+ minutes to solve and people often play for 20-30mins most days. So, this was intriguing to me.
However, as always, the devil is in the details. Some things that I haven't seen (much?) in other comments yet:
- to be accepted to Underground, you have to have an existing app on Play or Amazon.
- the submitted app must be "substantially similar to or better". I.e. no stripping out extra volumes or removing key features
- that app must not already have ads
- you have to seamlessly migrate state for players already using your game (i.e. help your current paid? users move to free (for them))
- Amazon can show ads at the end, as well as at the beginning
- you can't change your mind and withdraw the app within the first 3 months
- if you do withdraw your app, you must continue to support it for anyone who has downloaded it (including keeping backend servers running etc)
- it's not permitted to tweak your app to try and game it for extra time spent
- if your app uses subscriptions, it's not eligible
- lots of fine print here, fwiw: https://developer.amazon.com/public/support/legal/da#AmazonU...
I ran basic numbers for my apps through Amazon's convenient calculator (https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/ca...). It's impossible to know some of outcomes, notably: how much appearing in Underground will canibalize my existing apps in either Play or Amazon?
If I niavely assume that all my usage & IAP payments switch immediately from Play & Amazon combined, to be just Amazon Underground, the numbers for one of my apps works out as:
- Number of user engaged minutes last month: 728300 (according to Flurry session tracking)
- Revenue for this app: USD$1446.37 (this is for 2 months prior, but close enough)
So, if I go to the calculator and enter 728300 minutes into Amazon, 0 mins for Google, $1446.37 Amazon revenue, $0 Google revenue, and 0% increase for both, then I get the magic number of $1457.
I.e., $10 more with Underground. But ... does this really mean anything?
On the dev/web jockey side, I figure about a day per app to adapt and submit it. Some of the steps needed for my apps are:
- rebuild the app with a different package name (presumably so it doesn't conflict with a prior installed version of my app
- ideally remove all IAP (if it is already Amazon IAP, then they'll just make it free anyway, but if it's Play, then rip it out / replace with "Unlock" instead of "Purchase" and skip the calls to Google). I have Amazon IAP already, but I'd spend a few minutes to make them all free instead. And maybe a few more minutes to remove the Amazon IAP support library. Then a few more minutes to resolve build errors. Then a few more minutes to test that I didn't screw it all up. (Repeat.)
- create a new app listing at the Amazon web site, following their carefully detailed criteria (https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do...)
- add an "Actually Free" sash to my icon (https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/underground/do...)
- build, test, repeat
TL;DR: I'm on the fence. Switching would indeed capture revenue from the 90% of users who never buy extra volumes. However, it could kill revenue from those who do. Other intangibles:
- will it annoy the customers who have paid me so far - by definition my best customers. Will they ask for refunds?
- will iOS customers demand something simlar?
- should I promote this to my customers?
- should I jump in REALLY fast (today!) so all the early Underground adopters find my apps because there will be fewer to choose from initially
For now, I'm sitting tight. I've had a strict "no ads" policy in all my apps so far (and no spyware either), so I'll see how it evolves.
One related detail: my app revenue for Android used to be evenly split between Amazon and Google Play. For the past twelve months, Amazon has been declining, even though Play (and iOS) have been gradually increasing. I'm not sure if this reflects declining Kindle Fire adoption, decreased visible of my apps in the Amazon store, or ... ?
I hope this adds some data to the commentary...