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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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".
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.
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'?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
I bought my daughters Kindle Fire's for Christmas. It doesn't have the Google Play store. 99.99% of the apps available, either free or even paid, are cookie cutter, mass produced, generic garbage. Almost all the free apps were complete junk.
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.
If your kid is reading at a first grade level or so, the best device for her is a Chromebook. It can play all the little flash games on nickjr.com or pbskids.org, but is also a tiny functional computer with a full keyboard and trackpad.
You have my attention as a potential customer - you are saying Amazon FreeTime Unlimited is useless due to hardware/software issues? To me it seemed like a unique service no other company is attempting to provide right now. Can you give any additional detail regarding the device type and specific issues? Thanks in advance for your time!
I see this as hugely superior to the freemium model, both from the perspective of the user and the app developers. App developers no longer need to cripple their apps and sell in-app band-aids to make money. The developers of the more entertaining and engaging apps will make more money. End users no longer spend a bunch of time on a game only to find out they need to pay to advance to the next part, or bypass some artificial restriction that shouldn't be there.
It just seems like a much more civil relationship.
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.
Points (1) and (2) are true for ad-supported games in general. What Underground provides is a way for games developers to be able to provide a low-barrier ad-supported version of their game while being completely unconcerned with ads. It essentially allows the developer to engage in two different business models (pay-for-install and ad-supported) without that dual-model creeping into the implementation of the game. In that respect, this developer-player inter-mediation is more of a threat to Valve's Steam than it is for Google's Play store.
How are 1) and 2) different than the status quo? Aren't developers already incentivized to keep users in their app for as long as possible? More touch points -> more IAP buying opportunities -> more money.
> 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).
That sounds like baseless FUD. Underground is essentially the TV model. While some TV shows do stretch out longer than they need to in order to milk the audience, there are plenty of high quality ones that don't, and many people who have less time watch those instead, or pay for premium, short-time experiences like movies. Which we all know are just as likely to be of low quality despite their reduced length. Meanwhile, people who just want something on all the time they are at home have plenty of decent content to fill their time with.
There are number of differences that mean Underground is not "essentially the TV model" when it comes to economic incentives. But, there are some similarities that can help us seem what some of the behaviours are going to be for content producers.
- 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.
I submitted my reply before being aware of the advertising model Amazon had for this.
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.
The high quality shows that don't stretch out the plot are the "must have" shows that drive cable subscription numbers and are somewhat disjoint from ad revenue.
I generally agree, but it seems like it could have some bad side-effects if it becomes a popular business model, though.
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.
> 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.
If interstitial ads were superior to the freemium model the market would already reflect that but it doesn't. The freemium model has just become a silly bogeyman in these discussions. Yes it can be abusive, yes it can be implemented horribly, just like any other pricing system. OTOH freemium is often best for both developers (differential pricing maximizes revenue) as well as users (rich whales are happy to pay, others are happy to be subsidized by them).
Maybe ... but it hugely depends on the per minute price Amazon are paying.
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)
Did anyone look at the list of permissions? Amazon isn't paying developers for interstital ads ... it's paying them to have an excuse to track everything on your phone:
"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]
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.
remember that you paid $4.64, but 30% of that went to Amazon anyway.
Generally, about 2-3% of the people who would download a free app would also pay for it, which could make Underground a good choice. People who haven't paid though, aren't as invested, and are more likely to quit using that app sooner.
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.
There are also a lot of people out there who would not be willing to pay the $4.64 dollars. By using this model, developers can get both the people who want to buy it through the store and people who don't want to spend any money to play it, which might end up being more total profit.
This actively discriminates against people who find certain typefaces difficult, those using assistive technologies, and those using mobile devices. It's also not machine-friendly, so search engines can't index it and Ctrl+F doesn't work.
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 am very sympathetic to your position, but CSS support in email clients is still surprisingly primitive (e.g. MS using Word's html rendering engine in Outlook). If you look at the source of most html emails that you get, they will be using tables for layout...
Isn't this the same model that funds most websites? Zero cost in exchange for advertising and, I'm guessing, giving up your private information - with all the positives and negatives associated with that model.
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.
They reaaallly want the Amazon app store to happen on Android, don't they? We'll see if free content will be enough to get non-tech-savvy users to go through the trouble of installing an .apk file.
I'm genuinely curious about your stance. You would prefer more ads to paying? I thought more tech-savvy people prefer to pay small amounts for apps, so that they are the customer.
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.
Interesting. Curious about the reaction to Google Play not allowing such an app. (I'm guessing restrictions on app stores are ok when Google does them)
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.
The key difference on Android is, and has always been, that you can get apps from off of Google Play. Google's store is just a store with its own policies, and you can install apps from anywhere (including other stores) if you want.
Which is why there is an Android version of this, and no iOS version.
Having just left a career at Amazon that spanned nearly 5 years, I can say with experience that it is not so uncommon to find this happening. I worked at a subsidiary, and we had to bill Amazon Corporate for our own AWS use. Being a media-oriented company, this particular subsidiary is sometimes a bit of an expensive AWS customer.
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.
I actually tried to install this, but stopped when it prompted me for permissions. It literally asked for every permission I can imagine (read and write my files, all contacts, all calls & texts, all sensors, etc etc etc).
This is Android - what about apps that run mostly in the background ? A music player, fitness tracker, activity tracker? What about apps that run continuously, like a launcher ?
What is security like on Amazon's appstore? It has all-encompassing permissions.
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).
It wouldn't be feasible to do this on iOS. It'd required everyone of their customers to jailbreak their phone, and then all of the app developers would violate the TOS with Apple by releasing the app in ways that circumvent the app store.
Amazon's own OS is a fork of Android, and the Amazon Appstore consists almost entirely of Android apps you could also get through Google Play. So it makes sense they'd do it for just Android.
iOS doesn't allow apps to be installed outside a few apple controlled processes without a JailBreak.
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.
My understanding is not directly, however it could be argued that they were encouraging the end user to break the EULA on the product and thus interfering in the contract between apple and the end user. Different legal systems would view it differently.
On the other hand, apple could just throw more money into securing the phones from jailbreaking and end the business model much easier.
Seems like Amazon are trying to replicate WeChat by creating a platform that people don't leave to use apps. By owning this 'ecosystem', Amazon can (a) collect all sorts of data from what apps people use, how long they use them, when they use them, etc. and (b) can provide ads (as Sigmar states) that are very targetted.
One problem with Amazon App Store on Android phones is that if I replace my Android phone, I have to start all over again. Using the Google ecosystem, it's a matter of signing in and all my backed up apps and data are reinstated. There's a lot more friction to keep using the Amazon App Store/Underground app than there is with Google Play Store.
untrue, you re-add the amazon app store and your apps are back. Google also recently changed it so it doesn't force reinstall everything, you choose what you want re-installed. Or at least it did in 5.2. I actually prefer it as some apps are garbage
So where are the actual apps? After jumping through all those hoops I get a 4th damn amazon app on my phone that just takes me to the amazon storepage? And displays the unground banner at the top (again) that leads to a blank page with just a refine search button on it?
Tempted to uninstall them all...except the Kindle.
There are serious privacy implications of this. Is there a separate privacy policy for this? Will there be cross app user tracking / retargeting? Are there any privacy opt-outs?
My (still incomplete) analysis of whether it's worth it for my apps...
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
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.)
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 ... ?
Repeating my call for each HN post to have a new, separate comments section specifically for shitty comments about the page itself as opposed to the ideas contained therein
It's like the theory of HTML and CSS - content vs presentation. Much like HTML and CSS, reality is a blur of them both, but we can still aspire to separate them as much as we can.
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)