{"id":2916,"date":"2011-04-12T10:39:13","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T10:39:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/2011\/04\/kindle_pricing\/"},"modified":"2011-04-12T10:39:13","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T10:39:13","slug":"kindle_pricing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2011\/04\/kindle_pricing\/","title":{"rendered":"Kindle Pricing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Interesting news emerges from the US, where Amazon has decided to release <a href=\"http:\/\/latimesblogs.latimes.com\/technology\/2011\/04\/amazon-kindle-special-offers-ads.html\">a lower priced<\/a> Kindle. The base model wi-fi only Kindle was $139, but Amazon is now retailing a $114 version which comes &#8220;with Special Offers&#8221;. That effectively means GroupOn style one-off discounts and other advertising messages.<br \/>\nA couple of things occur to me:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The people who haven&#8217;t yet bought a Kindle, and to whom this is undoubtedly aimed at, aren&#8217;t necessarily the most desired group by advertisers. These are people to whom price matters a great deal. The near-$100 price point drags them into the market<\/li>\n<li>Amazon is effectively telling consumers what their value is to advertisers. It&#8217;s the difference between the two price points plus some admin costs. Do you feel good or bad knowing you&#8217;re worth $25?<\/li>\n<li>Is the pricing point right?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ll go into that third point a little more. Most of us are now aware of the freemium model, where you perhaps download a programme or  application for your mobile that offers a modest set of features and perhaps some advertising. If you pay for the premium application or programme, the advertising disappears and you get additional functionality. Spotify is a prime example of this.<br \/>\nBut in those instances, you first tend to come across the free model, and then determine whether the increase in price is worthwhile to you.<br \/>\nAmazon is doing the reverse. The price of the Kindle has been established. Now you&#8217;re getting a discount in return for advertising. But I&#8217;m not sure that the discount is steep enough. Irrespective of whether consumers think that they&#8217;re being valued at $25 (point two above), I&#8217;m just not sure that the $114 price is attractive enough. Surely $99 would have made sense?<br \/>\nIt must be said that by starting out at $114, Amazon leaves itself the ability to continue lowering the price of it&#8217;s ad-supported model, but I&#8217;m not sure how many consumers are ready to jump.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not an expert in the psychology of pricing &#8211; an area that is very interesting &#8211; but it would seem to me that if I was fresh in the market for an eBook reader and had the choice fo the $114 and $139 model, I might well end up getting the more expensive model since the price differential was not great, and the value to me would be worth the removal of a potential irritance in advertising.<br \/>\nOf course there might be a handful of consumers who see it as an overall positive that they get both a cheaper Kindle <I>and<\/I> lots of great targeted offers. But I think it&#8217;s fair to imagine that they&#8217;re in the minority.<br \/>\nAnyway, in the UK this is all a moot point, since the deal has yet to be replicated over here. And in any case, I&#8217;m not remotely convinced that eBook readers are right for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Interesting news emerges from the US, where Amazon has decided to release a lower priced Kindle. The base model wi-fi only Kindle was $139, but Amazon is now retailing a $114 version which comes &#8220;with Special Offers&#8221;. That effectively means GroupOn style one-off discounts and other advertising messages. A couple of things occur to me: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}