Could audiobooks be the next frontier for advertising? | Hacker News Reader

Could audiobooks be the next frontier for advertising?

marketingbrew.com

19 pointslxm41 comments

Ugh, I hate even thinking about ads during a "reading" experience.

I've also got an anecdote about Audible that will make me quite literally never subscribe to the service, even if it somehow becomes the only game in town.

Was in the Amazon bookstore in UVillage (Seattle) 4-5 years ago, and overheard one of the sales reps at the counter checking customers out signing then up for Audible subscriptions. As every customer walked through the checker's line, they casually mentioned the customer's purchase qualified for 3 free months of audible and said they'd get that activated with their purchase.

It was VERY CLEAR most customers weren't paying attention at all and this checker was printing new subscriptions that I'm willing to bet most customers wouldn't ever notice on their monthly credit card statements. I sat there for maybe 10-15 minutes listening and in that time span it was at least 10+ customers that got signed up.

And while I'd like to blame this individual checker, I'm 100% sure this sales tactic was coming from a manager that was almost certainly coming from Amazon corporate.

Disgusting thinking about how many people ended up subscribed to a monthly service they had virtually no understanding of.

> I'm 100% sure this sales tactic was coming from a manager that was almost certainly coming from Amazon corporate.

This reminded me of when I recently helped my mother-in-law cancelling all her Amazon subscriptions she forgot she had, they make it VERY easy to not find out about the different ways you spend money on Amazon. For instance you have to log into the accounts for different countries separately to see that you have Prime subscriptions in those countries.

Reminds me of a similar episode at a convenience store in Colorado a few weeks ago. I was paying for a cup of coffee and the woman on the register asked if I was a member of their frequent shopper plan. No. "Would you like to sign up?" No.

So far, just like pretty much every brick and mortar retail experience in 2023. But then it got weird.

"If you sign up you get a free cup of coffee every month."

No thanks.

"If you sign up you get cash back on every purchase."

No thanks.

"If you sign up you get a free donut right now."

Um, could I just pay for my coffee?

"If you sign up we will give you a free tank of gas on your birthday. You really should think about it."

By this time I had my hand out waiting for my change, which she finally gave me. She tried one more pitch as I walked away.

It was very strange. Obviously her boss had told the employees something like "You must sign up at least 20 new customers per day or you're fired."

I felt sorry for her. This modern retail obsession with mining customer data is making it so I don't want to walk in to any place with a cash register.

The distressing thing is how loyalty programmes have been hijacked. They used to be harmless, e.g. a printed business card and they punch holes: there wasn’t any or more than perfunctory tracking because doing more wasn’t viable. Simple and obvious: this card is a straightforward incentive to keep coming back, no strings attached. But now it’s all digital and all tracking and all mining, and most people don’t realise this or think through the implications.

Advertising people are just the worst. I have an old TV/console setup I sometimes use, and sometimes use YouTube on it. the amount of advertising (with no blocker) is horrific, way worse than broadcast or cable television used to be. On music performance videos they will sometimes put ads in the middle of a song.

The whole industry is trash, and as far as I'm concerned Madison Avenue and everyone connected with it are fair game for any military power on earth to take potshots at.

YouTube is horrible with it - start a video, watch an ad - skip forward, watch an ad - skip more forward, watch an ad, skip forward, ad...

Use an alternative front end like Invidious [1] and you won't see any ads - yet.

I assume they will eventually start live-patching ads into the actual video streams and refuse to serve the rest of the stream unless the player has confirmed the ad has been shown. I can think of plenty ways how to achieve that so I guess the bottom feeders at those ad companies can do the same. If/when that happens it'll be bye-bye Youtube and any other venue which implements such measures.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

I'm sure it will go about as well as Spotify's foray into podcasts.

In other words, it'll suck, but it'll save a small number of people enough money that it sticks around for way too long. Audible already has a near-monopoly on audiobooks, so at least there's a vague hope that this could shake up the market a bit when people get fed up with ad creep.

Looking forward to ads in ebooks and paper books soon after. Then we can get ads on toilet paper, ads on toothbrushes, and eventually, less-relevant ad breaks from your relevant ads. Self-perpetuating like Wall Street financing.

I remember ads in some of my father's science fiction paperbacks as a kid. As such, it wouldn't be unprecedented.

Usually cigarette ads, if your father's books were anything like mine.

Frankly I wonder if professionally-produced audiobooks are even going to exist in five or ten years. I'm a huge audiobook consumer and lately I've been consuming the entire HP Lovecraft bibliography, as narrated by AI-voice Dagoth Ur. It's every bit as good as a real narrator and when these AI voice models can run on local hardware I'm never buying another audiobook again. It's going to be incredible for books that never got an audiobook version, or whose audiobook recording is very old and poor quality, or just authors that picked a really annoying narrator.

As per usual: if a header is a question, it can be answered with "no"

Isn't it almost guaranteed that someone will at some point subsidize the cost of audiobooks or the audiobook subscription by adding ads?

> _Could_ audiobooks be the next frontier for advertising?

Like cable tv, why subsidize when you can just increase the middleman’s revenue?

I assume the ads would be for soup?

https://lithub.com/the-time-terry-pratchetts-german-publishe...

LeVar Burton Reads has ads (if you're not subscribed to Stitcher Premium). The episode plays a cerain sound, he reads the ad, then another sound and you're back to the story. It's not great but it's not that bad.

Hm, looks like they added pre-roll ads while I wasn't paying attention. That's worse :(

https://www.stitcher.com/show/levar-burton-reads/episode/fir...

Wouldn't listen to audiobooks if they had ads.

Am surprised nobody has mentioned Libro.FM here - I get most of my audiobooks from them. They claim to give a portion to my local bookseller, though they don't provide any evidence to this effect and I would continue to use them even if they didn't. It's a monthly subscription which gives you a new book every month, but you can pause any time and the books are still around, then resume when you need more books. Your mileage may vary; the model works well for me.

I wonder how this works for the narrator and author. On the surface it seems like another reason why narrators shouldn't use a royalty share for earning from narrating books. As I bet this would cut into your earnings. Especially if the price goes to zero.

No mention that I can find that the narrator might get a portion of that ad revenue.

Eh. What am I worried about, they'll all be written by and narrated by AI soon anyway, because of course they will.

Given that they can get a maximum of 40% of the revenue per book sold by Audible, they’ll continue to be screwed over. Even if the ad revenue is counted at full value into the calculations.

Which I doubt, given how they consider a $15 subscription credit to be worth $1 (for every sale I’ve seen to date).

Another thing that will need an adblocker.

Youtube already needs two (sponsorblock and ublock) just to be usable.

Oh please no

If it’s anything like what podcasts lately have become. Yes.

If I hear one more local auto dealer commercial ripped directly from the tv version and spliced directly into my podcast when downloaded… I guess I just have to take it.

For some reason, the auto-insert podcast ads have started coming to me in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish, so it's actually great: I can just skip forward until I get back to English.

I haven't encountered this yet, but the instant I do, I'll stop following that podcast. No podcast is worth that.

Sounds awful, but as long as they only use it for free users like the article states, I don't really care I guess. If I ever get ads in an audiobook I paid for, I'd be extremely upset.

I think if the price of an audiobook were lowered because of advertising then it could be a great way to get more people listening, but companies prefer profits than lower prices.

The price of an audiobook with ads better be zero.

Or negative, then I would consider thinking about it, maybe.

People who value their time so little generally make poor advertising targets

The people who pay for things things that save them time because they value their time are bad advertising targets? Seems like a juicy market.

If so, then audiobooks are a technology I won’t be using.

Same here.

I wonder if Blind People could sue, sounds like disability discrimination to me. Printed Books, no ads, Audio Books have ads.

With publishers going after E-books in Libraries, its like publishers want books to go the way of Newspapers. Already reading is declining quite a bit with the young, and I doubt any young people use Audio Books. Good way to destroy another industry.

edit: spelling

> Printed Books, no ads

They're not common, but I own a few printed books that have ads on some of the pages.

This would piss me off enough for me to start an advert-free audiobook pirating ring. And I suspect a lot of people would want to participate.

Does it still count as Betteridge’s law if the answer is “Oh god, for the love of all that is good in this world, NO!”

Not sure if it will work out that way. Even God needs tons of advertising.

Suggested title rewording: “could audiobooks be the next thing poisoned by advertising?”

Given the highly infectious nature of that cancer, just about anything might be the “next frontier”.

whooaa.... advertisers are moving way to fast; too many new changes. I think we should hold up on any new ways of advertising until we can wrap our heads around this all.

Please no...

Totally agree!!!!

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