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How Amazon’s Ad Business Could Threaten Google and Facebook
- dang 9y agoWe changed the URL from http://archive.is/ZdCQL http://archive.is/ZdCQL. Please post the original link. It's fine to include a link to an archived version in the comments. Users frequently do that as a favor to other readers. But please don't submit such a link to begin with, because it obscures the source of the article and messes up the data.
- philipov 9y agowhich data?
- dewey 9y agoProbably dupe check and other things that rely on the correct domain.
- raguuu 9y agoEasy to fix that. Archive.is is a popular tool.
- dang 9y agoThings like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wsj.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wsj.com. Nothing too surprising, but surprisingly essential to the coherence of the site.
- chatmasta 9y agoWhat about domains that are instaflagged? For example, I tried posting a Breitbart article [0] about a conservative blogger at Google, because in this one case I felt like it was the best "primary source" to get the discussion started. It was auto-killed like every article on Breitbart. [1] So I resubmitted via archive.is and actually got 6 upvotes [2], showing there was at least some interest in the topic that would never had surfaced if I used the original link. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16103017 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=breitbart.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=breitbart.com [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16246184
- raguuu 9y agoI'm hellbanned because HN doesn't like my views. Sometimes my comments do go through for whatever reason.
- dang 9y agoYou're banned because you've serially abused HN and broken the site guidelines many times. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
- raguuu 9y agoI have never received the reason or what guidelines I have broken many (???) times.
- croon 9y agoHave we really arrived at a place where "conservative blogger" is an accurate description of a person who: * "isn't exactly allergic to the stuff" (re: white nationalism) * wrote "Not all humans are born the same, of course, and the innate character and intelligence of some is more suited to mastery than slavery. For others, it is more suited to slavery. " * asked "What's so bad about the Nazis?" * etc ? I'm not sure if it's liberals or conservatives who should be offended by that. Hopefully both.
- walshemj 9y agoExactly these so call "conservative" views are actually hard right ones if not oughtright fascist ones. In UK terms the national front or EDL. Danmore did not want to say set up a group of googlers into field sports (hunting Shooting and Fishing) did he.
- chatmasta 9y agoThe interesting part of that article was that his views were sufficient to silently land him on a “do not visit” list at Google HQ, which implies that Google is tracking people who hold such opinions and adding them to such lists.
- tanilama 9y agoAds is free money from Amazon. After all they have the best possible traffic one can imagine: clear shopping intent queries, with customer shopping history. They just need to put up the billboards, the money will follow. Maybe not Google scale, but free money, what not to like?
- arbuge 9y agoSeveral things... for example: as a seller advertising on Amazon, you are sharing all your profit metrics with a potential competitor who has a history of stepping in with their own proprietary branded products where they see significant profits to be made.
- NicoJuicy 9y agoI call BS, it's a bubble ad network. The chances are users will be happier with a product through natural selection ( eg. better/trustwurthy reviews), than products through ads. Although, Amazon could earn more in short term, users are less satisfied and they lose money long term. What happens if Chinese vendors buy all the ads and set a lower price ( which they can). Then most buyers won't be satisfied on Amazon ( terrible English) and they start using AliExpress ( cheaper and same shipping terms after eg. 1 year of Chinese vendors that dominate Amazon). This "free money" could be their downfall. Already technical users here on HN don't want to use Amazon for the risk of receiving counterfeit products.
- the_watcher 9y agoAmazon is in complete control of the ads they show. Quality of ads is a huge goal of anyone working on an ad network trying to compete with Facebook or Google.
- jack9 9y ago> Quality of ads is a huge goal How you do that is part of the lifecycle of an Ad platform. The ephemeral "quality of ad" is completely subjective and will forever be inadequately measured (to anyone's satisfaction for very long). Eventually all ad networks are subject to market pressures in pursuit of margins. Third party ads eventually arise from the existing technical implementation of ads (tons of untrusted code running in js and vpaid applications), even when "prohibited". There's nothing special about Amazon's platform. Lots of platforms have been the "new hot thing" with "total control".
- ksk 9y ago>Already technical users here on HN don't want to use Amazon for the risk of receiving counterfeit products. Are you talking about low quality or counterfeit? Personally I don't care about counterfeit, but I do care about quality. In any case, Amazon already has been tackling it to some extent. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-fights-counterfeit-goods-2017-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/how-amazon-fights-counterfeit...
- CodeSheikh 9y agoWe see (or are forced to see) ads on Google, Facebook et al. is because they are free to use services for consumers. Eventhough that bother some us so much that we use all sort of ad blocking plug-ins at our disposal to stop seeing those pesky ads. I pay for my Amazon Prime membership and for every product I purchase on Amazon.com. Last thing I want is getting bombarded by obnoxious ads. while shopping for my next two-day delivery of Topo Chico water bottles there. Unless Amazon decides to roll out a steeply discounted Prime membership program, I would be a very unhappy customer seeing ads on a paid platform.
- tanilama 9y agoAds for Amazon is like Walmart choosing what product to be put on display and where. It is an established business. I echo some of your sentiment. If Amazon is truly as customer obsessive as they branded themselves, they would avoid putting cheap ads out there. Since their click rate is going to be so high, those ads will be very expensive indeed, which I would assume to be quality ads as well.
- CodeSheikh 9y agoQuality ads would be like "hey see that you are buying Topo Chico. Why don't you try these new flavors as well at a discounted rate?". Instead of "Buy Nestle water" ads. Or something very unrelated. Basically a win-win situation for both parties. But to be honest I would be very much reluctant at seeing a lot of ads. They do this already with "Sponsored" products and most of the time it serves as distraction instead of convincing buyer into even at least clicking their ad.
- remir 9y agoThis is what I never understood in online ads. You're looking to buy, say, a North Face jacket but the price is a bit higher than you're willing to pay, so you close the tab. Now, you go elsewhere on the web and you see ads for that particular jacket, but there's no incentive for you to click on the ad because you already know the price is too high. But if the ad says: "hey, 10% off on this jacket in the next 30 minutes with coupon code xyz" then yeah you might click on the ad, buy the jacket and in the end, the customer, the retailer and the ad agency are all winning.
- NicoJuicy 9y agoFacebook was more likely to threaten Google. But I think they failed, amazon won't be a threat. Ps. A possible big competitor is not not considered a threat in this context. Just as Facebook is a big competitor to Google, but failed to be a threat
- mbesto 9y agoFacebook has a different ad network than Google. Google is really good for intent-based advertising (Shopping for example) and Facebook is really good for prospecting (finding new buyers).
- wastedhours 9y agoFor me, Amazon will be because the nature of their advertising is intent-based, like Google's. What Facebook has always struggled with is the context of the adverts (by their very nature), whereas Google and Amazon's advertisers already have the user's intent right there (searches for services/products).
- hyperbovine 9y agoWhat use is intent if you know every single intimate detail of a person's private life.
- matt4077 9y agoJudging by the ads I get on Facebook: a lot.
- NicoJuicy 9y agoWith the difference that Amazon queries are a subset of Google's queries. When using the same keywords, you should add "buy online" / "shop" on Google. And some people on HN just don't want to buy on Amazon because of counterfeit products. Ads on Amazon will probably make it worse.
- amelius 9y agoFacebook also has a search-engine (with a search-bar), and for all we know, 95% of the population may be using it.
- musage 9y agoHow the Yakuza could threaten the Mafia is nowhere near as interesting as how the police should do away with both, for good.
- sillypuddy 9y agoWhat would this look like compared to something like Kaiser Permanente?
- freehunter 9y agoDid you perhaps mean to ask this in the other Amazon thread right now? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16264662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16264662
- sillypuddy 9y agoYup
- j-c-hewitt 9y agoSince their ad program was released, I've been running ads on Amazon as well as ads on the other platform for both clients and myself. Amazon's ad platform has always had fewer features, a crappier interface, worse third party software available, and has at times run by confusing rules that aren't fully documented. None of that matters because it's 4-10x+ more cost effective and doesn't require a large budget or a sophisticated account structure to generate profitable sales in volume. In general the American people have demonstrated a preference and that preference is that more than half of them want to buy stuff on Amazon and not on other websites. Trying to get people to buy stuff on a non-Amazon website is rolling the stone uphill. It doesn't hurt that basically the entire middle class demographic in the US subscribes to Prime. If you sell physical things to customers online there is no better way to do it at this time. There are many issues involved in selling stuff on Amazon (and being an Amazon customer) but those problems really pale in comparison to the business model of running your own store on non-Amazon fulfillment and paying GooFaceBannerAd to drive traffic to your website that would really prefer to be going to Amazon.
- raywu 9y agoDoes it have cookies to help you measure conversion? How does the implementation compare to Facebook Pixel or GA / GTM?
- j-c-hewitt 9y agoYeah but those belong to Amazon. It's nothing like the FB pixel etc. and you get much less information than a good GA setup. It also depends on whether Amazon owns your products (Vendor) or if you own the products still (Seller). You get different sets of metrics based on that and also whether or not you pay extra for the fancy suite of metrics.
- raywu 9y agoThanks for sharing @j-c-hewitt, I was wondering about the vendor and seller distinction. I saw there were case studies of an insurance company increasing its quote requests. I suppose they're not listed as vendor on Amazon. What metrics are there in the fancy suite?
- ilamont 9y agoI use AMS for my publishing business. Amazon sales were up 73% the first year I started using it, although in the same year I also launched several new products that did well (and did not benefit much from AMS ads). Yes, the UI blows, there are various unfathomable policies ("One or more of your products doesn't meet the financial threshold established by Amazon and is no longer eligible for advertising" - this for one of our top-selling titles), and the reporting leaves a lot to be desired, but at the end of the day it works. The same cannot be said for Facebook ads (waste of time and money for what I sell), Google AdWords (hurt by its own popularity and ridiculous policies such as this one: http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2017/10/google-kills-my-ad-for-revisionist.html http://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2017/10/google-kills-my-a...), and LinkedIn which is fleecing small-business clients with sky-high CPCs that don't perform. I fear, however, that the popularity of AMS may cause the same fallout as AdWords - loads of buyers rushing in, driving up rates and driving organic results off the page.
- fredliu 9y agoMaybe I'm biased, but personally, I never ever clicked on any ads showed up along my google search query, even if they are relevant. I just can't get rid of the nagging feeling that: "there gotta be better deals else where (e.g. on Amazon?)" or "The merchant paid Google a premium to show up along side my search results, the price can't possibly be the lowest". Am I the only one feeling this way?
- rsbartram 9y agoWhy is there not a true rival to Google Adsense?
- exolymph 9y agoThe winner-take-all dynamics of the internet.
- ptlu 9y agoHello! I used to working on the AMS self-service advertising team as a developer. Note all opinions are my own. When I first joined the advertising team, I was unsure about a product that can have a seedy sort of reputation on the web. But I was very pleasantly surprised how much we care about the customer experience in regards to ads at Amazon. The end goal is always to show the customer the best item for purchase, and Retail would always set a high bar for the Ads team. This has in-turn caused us to invest a lot into ensuring the relevancy of our ads is top notch, we do not want to display ads which are ineffective - this hurts both the retail customer and the advertiser. Nothing would get approved without vigorous testing to ensure the ads had a neutral or positive impact on the retail customer.
- RestlessMind 9y agoWhile I don't doubt your personal integrity, I am sure a Google or Facebook employee would claim the same. After a while, organizational incentives start nudging you in a direction optimal for the company and not necessarily optimal for the user. It starts in slow imperceptible increments and before you know, your product is ad-infested sub-optimal UX.
- ctvo 9y agoExcept ads aren't Amazon's primary business or revenue stream. They're incentivized to do exactly what the OP stated.
- RestlessMind 9y agoOr so one would think. But you can try for yourself and see how ad-infested Amazon has become. To throw a few random examples, I just tried (from Mac / Chrome / Incognito / Signed-out mode), I searched for "sensodyne toothpase". Entire page is full of ads and I have to do a full scroll to see organic non-ads results. Same for "biodegradable trash bags". Almost the same situation for "qtips" though there were 2 partial images of organic search results. Its almost as if I am searching on Google (and no, thats not a compliment).
- 9y ago