What About Advertising?

Here’s one thing I’m not excited too see on my wireless digital picture frame: ads. But I know they’re coming and, in order to get the content and features we want on our frames, we’ll likely need to accept them.

We don’t have ads on traditional picture frames, after all, but that’s not quite the point. Digital frames and traditional frames aren’t the same thing, so seeing different content on them is to be expected, even applauded.

More than ever, ads are everywhere, subsidizing all kinds of content that consumers want to see. Advertising is the chief source of income for some of our biggest and most important companies: TV networks, newspapers, radio stations, and all the rest. Google’s $142 billion market capitalization is derived almost entirely from ad sales.

TiVo aside, watching ads is the trade-off we make to not have to pay for TV shows over the air, terrestrial radio, websites, and similar things. Most of us are happy to make this trade-off. After all, if we had to pay for each TV show we watched, we’d all watch a lot less TV!

In some media, though, there are ad-free options, such as public radio, satellite radio, and premium cable channels like HBO. The big difference between ad-free options and those that carry advertising is that the ad-free options require an additional payment.

It will be interesting to see how wireless photo frames approach this issue. No doubt there will be advertising on digital frames, especially in the content channels. An ESPN channel will, while providing sports information, also be advertising ESPN and may include interstitial images advertising Nikes or Under Armour.

And that’s fine. But will manufacturers allow consumers to pay more to opt out of seeing those ads? Will consumers want to pay that extra fee, as they do with public radio or Showtime?

Either way, hopefully these ads won’t show up in our personal photo slideshows. We don’t want to see our family photos treated like TV shows, sandwiched between ads for diapers and cars and movies. And we probably don’t want to associate our vacation memories or wedding days with light beer or computers or running shoes.

Whatever form frame advertising takes, I suspect we all agree that we don’t want to see the equivalent of email spam on our frames. Hopefully manufacturers and content providers will hear that and give consumers options for advertising on their frames.