One of the newest buzzwords in the Internet world is something called "native advertising." You'll be as hard-pressed to find a solid definition for that term as you would for finding a definition of other nebulous media terms like "marketing" or "Return on Investment."
My two favorite definitions so far are "organic brand experiences" and "anything that looks, acts and feels like content."
The idea is that on a social network or a blog, the ad would be so relevant to you as the user that you would want it to be there, and that it would be so similar to the content around it that you wouldn't even realize it's an ad. The closest things I can think of to these at present are the promoted tweets on twitter and the related stories features at the bottom of some blogs that lead you to a different website. Sometimes the tweet seems like any other tweet and sometimes the article looks very much like the rest of the content on the blog.
And I realized, with the convergence of ebooks and web content in general, any kind of advertising that will be making its way to blogs and social networks now will be making its way to ebooks and reading devices soon. I've been writing about the Kindle Lending Library and the possibility of streaming ebook services, which makes me wonder how advertising would fit into those services.
Would native ads in an ebook work?
For the most part I think not. There are very few books I can think of that have ads within them, and those that do are a little older and have ads in the back for the author's other books.
What if ads related to the topics, storylines, etc. were in the ebook as you read it? And in return for letting that happen you got to borrow the book for free. I'm not sure I'd want them in my print book, but when I think about ebooks, I'm not entirely opposed to ads because I'm so used to them on the rest of my devices.
What do you think?
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