4 ms·

The ads have been there for a long time (I know because I've either spent or managed spending on millions of dollars in clicks). It's not even the first time th

The ads have been there for a long time (I know because I've either spent or managed spending on millions of dollars in clicks). It's not even the first time that it's been written about in the tech press. The share of voice provided to ads on Amazon's search results is not particularly greater than what you see on Google or FB. The headline ads are a little newer, but they're still more than a couple years old. On many Google searches you have to scroll past the fold to get past the sponsored results. With search, unless you provide some avenue for sponsored results, you will get a winners-win-more effect in which the top 3 results for any given search will capture the entire market. You will get people complaining about 'discoverability' when they are not complaining about advertising. You can't stop people complaining about stuff: you can only trade around what people are complaining about today. I will say that as Google has generally subtracted or crippled features that are useful to advertisers over the last several years, Amazon has generally kept things simple and effective. Also, virtually no customer information is exposed to advertisers through use of the platform. Everything about a customer is essentially exposed if you are the seller, however, but that isn't different from running a print catalog.

Marsymars 8y ago
> With search, unless you provide some avenue for sponsored results, you will get a winners-win-more effect in which the top 3 results for any given search will capture the entire market. If a seller really cared about this, they could implement something like a Robson Rotation for search results of relatively equivalent quality for the search criteria.
- j-c-hewitt 8y ago
  There are millions of SKUs. On any popular search result there are hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, not all of which are of equal quality. The organic search results (and partially the paid ones) already rank things and will often swap spots frequently during any 24 hour period if they're otherwise close to even in relevance.

Marsymars 8y ago

> With search, unless you provide some avenue for sponsored results, you will get a winners-win-more effect in which the top 3 results for any given search will capture the entire market. If a seller really cared about this, they could implement something like a Robson Rotation for search results of relatively equivalent quality for the search criteria.

j-c-hewitt 8y ago
There are millions of SKUs. On any popular search result there are hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, not all of which are of equal quality. The organic search results (and partially the paid ones) already rank things and will often swap spots frequently during any 24 hour period if they're otherwise close to even in relevance.