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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

Took me a minute to find out what "actually free" means:

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)

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Finally, someone figures out the real reason Amazon is doing this. Thank you for doing the job all the journalists reporting on the press release failed to do.

If ^ is true, why does amazon feel the need to disclose this at all? Seems like a weird set of words that either displays culture or product. They could easily say nothing and sign the same deal.

Of course there are ads. Amazon never implied that there wouldn't be. This isn't Amazon trying to be sneaky. The opening lines say that everything is free and developers get paid according to use. How did you expect that would happen? It has to be subsidized in some way, and in the context of an app store that means ads.

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.

Not mentioning ads at all in an announcement about a service that adds ads to apps to replace the fee isn't being sneaky?

I don't think so. Facebook doesn't say "This is free with ads!" It says it's free to use. It just so happens that ads are byproduct of using it.

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.

Well, "free" means there is no consideration on the part of the party receiving what would be deemed as a gift. Looking at ads and having your data sold is not free by any means.

It doesn't mean that at all. Free (gratis), by definition, means you don't have to pay for anything. You don't spend dollars. Watching TV is free. Using Google and Facebook are free. You download free apps from the app store. And those all have ads.

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.

So you think the Free Software Foundation should really be called the Ad-Supported Software Foundation?

"Free" and "ad-supported" mean completely different things, and always have done.

> "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).

No, "ad supported" is not a subset of free.

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.

You're confusing something entirely different here. "Free" in "Free Software Foundation" is free as in freedom to use for any purpose[0][1], rather than free price. You should not use this example to argue whether "free price" implies "ad-free".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_movement

At the very least, I have to pay for it with my time, which is unrecoverable. If I can skip or otherwise ignore an ad, that is one thing, but forced interstitials is even more nebulous than a banner ad.

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.

That gets into a very hairy definition of "free." How much did Hacker News pay you for the time you spent commenting? Probably not market rate. Yet we'd still probably say that Hacker News is free.

I've never seen an interstitial on HN. Have you?

So, it's free unless there's an interstitial ad? That seems like an awfully random place to draw the line.

It's free if I suffer no cost. Do you bait and then throw up some monstrosity of an ad in a forced attempt to brainwash me? Or, maybe you don't bait and just force me to watch the ad. Either way, I suffer some cost, in the very least in having to detect the attempt and retreat from your page.

To act like that is not a real cost is...baffling.

It's not that that's not a real cost. Is that you don't include intangible things such as time and emotions when determining if something is free, by any expected usage of the word.

Hold on. My account balances are represented in a purely digital form. Almost all have no real physical record, at least not in sufficient detail or accessibility to be comparable to the digital form (in most cases it would probably be impossible to recover from a complete loss of the digital form). Most people here who use traditional banks and credit cards are probably in a similar situation. You are telling me that these numbers ($$$) that exist only as a pure digital artifact in some bank's database is a 'tangible thing'? But the time spent on the horrific and unsolicited intimate experience that you put me through with your ad is 'intangible'?

wut?

I should have said non-monetary.

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.

Yes, all the time. HN advertises jobs for y combinator companies and those ads are placed in between actual news stories.

There's a difference between telling a lie and being sneaky. Amazon didn't lie about this, it's true. But they definitely spent a lot of time implying that you'd be getting the same app you'd get elsewhere, just for free. Whether or not you consider the addition of ads to qualify as the same app or not is another question.

Oh, I definitely expected ads, I'm not surprised at all, and I don't think Amazon is being excessively sneaky (though it would be nice if this information was more prominent on their developer pages). I'm mostly disappointed in the authors of the multiple news articles I saw about this [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] for parroting Amazon's "Free Apps" PR without doing enough research to find out about the ads Amazon is using to pay for the deal.

[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...

Wow. Those links are pretty damning.

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.

No, the real reason Amazon is doing this is that they want to get the Amazon App Store onto Google and carrier branded Android phones. It's a fight for survival and relevance against Google Play.

Is amazon really in a fight to the death with Google play? Can I buy cat food there?

It's less Google Play and more breaking the control Google has over the Android platform, despite Android being open-source and spread out across a number of manufacturers. Google Play is a critical piece of that control.

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?

Partner with Amazon? I know when I got a Galaxy S4 the OEM Android included the Amazon App and Google Play stores. While they may do something different in Korea, it seems like a reasonable move in markets where Amazon has traction.

Does Amazon actually provide compelling apps on their store? The comments here and this new advertising platform would suggest otherwise.

Amazon's app store is a cesspit, full of either very similarly named Apps to ones on the play store, but that do something different, or people just straight up stealing other people's Apps and selling them themselves.

I think there should be an "app store" selection dialog, just as there should be a "default browser" selection dialog (ruled by the EU).

That might help, but I think that first there should be no rules that prevent apps which are not malicious and doesn't hurt end user from being in the app stores. What the world would have been like, if you wouldn't have had the ability to use IE6 to download Firefox?

Taken in the light of today's news about Fire engineers being laid off, it might suggest that Amazon is walking away from the Android hardware space but wants to stay relevant in the Android App space.

> 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)

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.

To be fair, Amazon didn't claim there wouldn't be any ads: https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1003016...

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.

I wasn't attacking them for claiming there weren't ads, sorry if it read that way. It's just that I read that entire page posted here, then went to my email and read the email they sent to developers, and I still didn't understand how or why they were doing this. I feel like they should have mentioned the word "ads" somewhere to explain how this would be paid for, rather than saying "actually free" over and over.

Still, it's kind of underhanded to emphasize the "it's like the premium apps, but free!" as if it's some revolutionary new model... when in reality it's just the typical ad-supported version of an app that customers are familiar with. (The model may be new for developers, but the promotional page is entirely aimed at customers.)

Is that it, just ads, or is the app also keeping an eye on the user?

So, how much can I pay Amazon to make the ads go away?

After you find a game you like enough to pay for, you could always buy it directly.

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