The new Kindle with Special Offers costs $114 and shows ads as screen savers and so far has some high-profile customers – Buick, Olay, Visa, and Amazon.com Reward Visa Card (Chase Bank). Some of the offers are quite good, giving back an additional $70 if you get an Amazon Rewards Visa, a $10 credit on an Amazon gift card and more. The details are below:
- $10 for $20 Amazon.com Gift Card
- $6 for 6 Audible Books (normally $68)
- $1 for an album in the Amazon MP3 Store (choose from over 1 million albums)
- $10 for $30 of products in the Amazon Denim Shop or Amazon Swim Shop
- Free $100 Amazon.com Gift Card when you get an Amazon Rewards Visa Card (normally $30)
- Buy one of 30 Kindle bestsellers with your Visa card and get $10 Amazon.com credit
- 50% off Roku Streaming Player (normally $99)
The question worth asking is why did it take so long for a mainstream player to come out with an ad-supported mobile device and will Google be far behind? How about Microsoft? Will advertising become a bigger factor in the consumer electronics space?
We all expected this to happen – Apple has applied for patents relating to showing intrusive ads on a mobile device, they own an ad platform and finally, we see so much of the world is ad supported. Even state governments are experimenting with the concept.
But all eyes should be on the release of this new Kindle which in my view should have been offered for $99. If it becomes a wild success, we can expect others to follow even more quickly. If not, it may effectively slow the move to ad-supported mobile products.
