Amazon's New Kindle Fire Tablets Are All Ad-Supported

This move is sure to upset the Hacker News and tech enthusiast crowds. After all, who wants to pay full price for a product that continues to deliver ads to you? The tacit contract across the web is that free == ad supported, while paid == no ads.

However, I'm not so sure if the average consumer (the target audience for the Kindle) will even think twice about this. Consider cable TV; People happily pay for cable TV subscriptions which still include commercial ads. They (arguably) don't get in the way of the end-user experience, yet they subsidize the costs for TV programming. Likewise, the ads on the Kindle are limited to the lock screen and kept out of the way of the actual user experience.

Also note that Amazon has deliberately chosen to not offer a higher-priced version without ads. Without an option to pay more to remove ads, the consumer will never have to debate whether or not the annoyance of the ads is worth $30 dollars to them. Instead, the ads become a fact of life and are accepted without question by the end users. Even better, it widens the Kindle advertising demographic to include those with the most disposable income who would otherwise pay to remove the ads. Smart move.

I ordered the Kindle Fire HD 32gig yesterday. I am considering cancelling it due to the ads for one major reason, battery life, and other reasons.

I don't want anything displayed when I lock it. I want it off. I also don't want anything displayed when I turn it on, I want instant access to my stuff.

I'm not a fan of Apple products, but I know the iPad is good for $600 (32gig version), so I feel like the price differential is somewhat reduced by ads, and I'm still taking on the risk of ending up with something like the original fire. ($240 difference)

I wish Amazon had shown a price to remove the ads along with the release and also showed an exact demo of how they work.

When they said customers are buying the best tablet, they really aren't if it has ads. Rather I am buying a lower end, ad supported tablet. From a marketing perspective, they signal low quality, rather than high quality to the customer.

I have one of the ad-supported Kindle e-readers and I can say that at first I thought I would be annoyed by them but it turned out that most of the ads were actually coupons. There was one to get a kindle case at 50% retail, which I used. Many others were good deals like that. When I was using it I found myself actually reviewing the ad on the screensaver before I turned it off to see if I liked the deal or not.

I wonder if the ads on the Fire will come from the Amazon daily deal site or other special offers rather than just banner ads like you'd see on a website.

I've said many times before that I will never buy another non-ad-supported Kindle as long as they're available. While the price going down is nice (not that it's much), what's more important to me is that the ads are actually good! I've gotten quite a few deals on books (e.g. $0.99 book deals not available to non-ad Kindle owners), probably close to $20 off on Amazon MP3, and quite a few other things I'm forgetting. They're not remotely obtrusive and they add value for me; I really can't see any downside whatsoever.

It is an interesting choice. There was a time when every television you bought was a conduit of ads. Think about that for a minute, here you had companies like GE, Panasonic, Toshiba, Magnavox, selling you this television for some price, and the only content you could get for it had un-skippable advertising injected several times an hour. There was no 'rev share' agreement with the TV manufacturers, they had to live or die on their hardware margins.

I think that this is both a smart move on the part of Amazon, and also a portent of bad things to come in general. One of the ideas behind the tablet 'ecosystem' in general (at least the one spawned by Apple), is to control the vision and view of your computing experience. Given that standard 'workstation' type computers are historically more free-form in how they allow you to access them and work with them compared to tablets, I suppose forcing ads upon the users was the next logical step for the structured tablet platforms.

I wonder more generally if this is the first shot across the bow and it's something we will see from Apple and Google in the future. I think the question at that point is also... how soon until the new Kindle gets rooted and these ads blocked ;).

There's a peevish backlash against advertising that permeates a lot of our culture and especially places like HN[1]. Some of it is founded, especially in older times, when it literally meant (paraphrasing PG) that you are subjected to X amount of abuse for Y amount of content. Some platforms are still like that (TV - for instance advertising tampons to me, is a little silly), but a lot (Google, Amazon, Netflix) aren't.

I think in the backlash I often see there's some discomforting thing that people want to express, as if we feel like like we're being had by advertising. It certainly feels that way during the political campaign, and I can sympathize.

But on the other hand advertising has certainly helped me out and I can even remember some very real examples. I had no idea the new intel chipset was out until an ad pointed it out. I had no idea that certain clothing and furniture brands existed until ads pointed them out. I had no idea Honda remade the Honda Elite moped in 2010 until an ad pointed that out. All of these were really useful to me, and all of them eventually lead me to buying something.

I bought all these things but I don't feel like I've been had. Both the products and the advertisements provided a lot of utility. We don't know what we don't know, as Donald Rumsfeld poetically said. Sometimes advertising can do the good of filling that gap. They deserve that much.

Some of the best books I've ever read were not recommended to me by my friends, who, if they share my tastes in books, only share them incidentally. Amazon on the other hand has done something great and given me real, concrete suggestions (read: advertisements) supported by the data I've given them whilst buying and browsing.

We have to give them at least a little credit. Advertising, especially for Google/Amazon/Netflix, is solving real problems for both the companies and the consumers.

[1] Stories that bubble to the top have titles like "work on something real, not ads" and remind me of phrases like "real women have curves". Both of which seem unnecessarily narrow and just plain mean to me.

Maybe most of the market doesn't care, but I care a lot. I gladly paid $30 more for an ad-free Kindle, and I won't be buying one of the new Fires if they don't have an ad-free version.

I have both ad supported and non-ad supported Kindles. The DX is not ad supported, and its screensaver is an ugly picture of an author. There seem to be about 10 of these, which it scrolls through. Those pictures are not settable by the user, and get awfully, awfully boring.

I prefer the ad supported one, at least you get new screensaver pictures once in a while.

Seems to only be on the lock screen.

In theory they could put whatever they want there, but I guess they will keep it low profile. Like related books, games and appliances that are relevant to your amazon profile.

Question now is if other tablet manufacturers have to go ad-supported in order to compete or if they'll play the "no ads here" card.

It seems they will allow you to opt-out:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/07/amazon-confirms-yes-you-c...

I'm glad I read this: I pre-ordered the ad version yesterday unawares, and just cancelled my order and re-ordered with the extra no-ad tax. My ship date slipped by 10 days sadly.

I think Amazon could make more money by offering an option to disable the ads for $x. Whoever is willing to pay is likely not someone to click on the ads anyway, but they avoid upsetting people who don't want to rent out their eyeballs.

One interesting question is whether or not Google will respond by adding an ad-supported component to their tablet ecosystem.

As a technical matter, I don't think it would be hard (for instance) to add Gmail ads to the Gmail app. And I'd think those ads wouldn't bother people much since they're used to them on the web. The real questions are whether or not the math works out and whether or not people would go for it (they way they apparently have with Amazon).

I would have liked to see an ad-free option, but given the quality of the ads, I'd have to try it out to see if it would bother me first.

I love how they imply the possibility of rooting.

The new KF will undoubtedly ship with a locked bootloader that checks ROM signatures and clobbers any unauthorized ROMs on startup.

It really all depends how intrusive ads are for me. As long as it doesn't keep me from doing what I want to do I can ignore it pretty easily.

How hard is it to jailbreak it? Has it already happened to the old Kindle Fire...?