3D Virtual Reader - The Revenue Potential in Publishing in Augmented Reality

Our goal is to build a market-ready publishing pipeline, from publisher to reader, within 2 years with the core elements in place, and establish a basic flexible online publishing architecture that can be built on and enhanced indefinitely. This requires two distinct elements:

A free 3D publication interface for readers that can be installed easily on all devices and continuously improved with updates, add-ons and innovations.

A free publisher’s portal where anybody can create and publish material in page turning format, whether for free, by subscription or through advertising revenue. The aim is monetizing content so that a percentage of subscriber and advertising revenues the publisher receives is our commission for providing production and distribution direct to their readers.

In most media, advertising can be intrusive and even irritating. Watching a good movie on TV when suddenly it pauses for a commercial break, billboards spoiling the landscape, or radio interrupting the flow of music for sponsor’s messages.

Uniquely, print media found the right formula for blending in content into their pages so that it actually enhanced the end product rather than distracted from it. Look at any print media rate card and you will see that they offer fixed sizes, quarter pages, half pages, full pages and so on.

This is possible because their media has a fixed standardized page. Print media follow a rule in almost all their pages: content and advertising are like oil and water — one floats on top of the other. A reader turns to a page to see the content, not the advertising message, but while they are reading through the columns of a story in a well laid out page, there discreetly in the bottom corner could be a quarter-page advertisement delivering a subliminal sales pitch for as long as it takes to read the page and move on.

Since a scrollable page in a web browser technically doesn’t have a fixed bottom of the page, and whatever is at the bottom needs to be scrolled down to see it, web media had to break the rule and put advertising on top of, and within, the content. How frustrating it is when you click a link in a web-based news service — the first thing you must do is start scrolling below advertising to read the story you are interested in, and keep scrolling as more advertising breaks the flow of what you are reading. This is understandable because, after all, what advertiser would buy a space that could not be seen unless it was scrolled to?

Advertising revenue will be one of the principal sources of income in AR publishing, but this time it will follow the rules that worked so well in print and were made possible by fixed page dimensions.

And every advertisement can be tracked and tailored to suit the audience.

On the one hand, the 3D publication UI will have fixed advertisement sizes and predefined positions, but on the other hand, advertisement selection will be dynamic and targeted to the reader. One of the elements in a page turning publication is that the next page will be in the buffer waiting for its turn to be viewed. That means that when turning to a page, it will instantly be ready for reading without waiting for the server to retrieve the content and advertising messages.

Something web pages cannot do is anticipate the next page a reader wants to see. But in a page turning publication it can.

And advertising in books and novels? Why not? If the author desires it, then let it be.

From the very beginning, this 3D publishing concept was designed to be an advertising medium. The originator actually started a publishing career as an advertisement sales person. The last thing we wanted to hear was that common reaction to some new publishing ideas: ‘That’s a nice idea but where is the revenue?’.

The other critical revenue base for publishers is copy sales and subscriptions.

Since in the 3D publication content will have end-to-end encryption and content won’t be able to be shared except when allowed, it will be an ideal platform for selling books, magazines, newspapers and any type of paid-for page turning material.

Imagine wearing AR specs and getting a ping that your newspaper has just been delivered hot off the press. Or your favorite magazine has just been published and sent to you? Or building a personal page turning library of copyrighted works much like Kindle?

Entrepreneurs could build their version of a digital newsstand much like those you see in the street and make money from instant copy sales. Or set up book clubs with a membership base sourcing new content and publishing reviews where copies can be bought with a single click.

There is no reason why a publisher can’t source revenue from both subscriber-copy sales as well as advertising in the same title — print media does that already.

The revenue base for an online reader’s portal is commission. Every subscription and copy sale will result in a commission that could be 10%, 15%, or whatever is right to give authors and publishers their fair share for creating the content in the first place. In print media this is already the norm — in book publishing even more so because of the costs of producing complete editions.

The technical payment infrastructure to instantly subscribe to any online content is already in place. It will be simple to extend that to AR publishing with its end-to-end encryption to ensure only the subscriber gets what they pay for and not shared to non-subscribers.