As someone who works in ads, I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. CTRs and conversion rates in the low single digits can be significant businesses at scale. S

As someone who works in ads, I'm not sure this is such a bad thing. CTRs and conversion rates in the low single digits can be significant businesses at scale. Search ads, display ads, and mobile phone games all run on minuscule conversion rates and yet drive huge revenues off of a combination of a large number of interactions and a head of users who purchase a disproportionate portion of revenue. Also, consider the converse of this: 98 percent of users use Alexa for something other than traditional shopping. That's huge! Playing music? That's revenue. Playing a movie? That's revenue. Asking a question? That's traffic not being sent to a traditional search engine. Also don't discount the value of having a toehold in someone's home. At the end of the day, this isn't a shopping play, this is a platform play. That device can be leveraged to sell new products, push new services, and enhance loyalty to the Amazon brand and ecosystem.