3 ms·

Amazon slashes commission rates for program that gives publishers a cut of sales

26 points by rexbee 6y ago

taurath 6y ago
Does anyone know how big of a program this is for things like vox, go media (former gawker) etc? It seems like a huge rate cut and given that some sites have huge sections of their site dedicated to "buy on amazon" could this be a big hit?
- pavelmark 6y ago
  Hopefully (for them) they have their own agreements apart from the general populace.
redis_mlc 6y ago
Amazon, Youtube, etc. need to think about how their affiliates and content providers can afford to create content. I understand their strategy is to milk creators for all they're worth, and only increase payments after there's competition. But content creation is a very expensive job, and if the money isn't there, then fresh content will dwindle. I know that Youtube creators are already thinking in 2020, "since I'm going to be demonetized, why should I care about view count? I'll just do what I feel like doing from now on." This hurts both sides: fan engagement for the creator, and decreased impressions and ad revenue for Youtube. You can watch Rick Beato's annual rant on being demonetized and/or blocked, when usually our age-old fair use law should preclude that. Unfortunately, Youtube's Content ID system is a parallel and private copyright system, so doesn't have to consider fair use. And ultimately this will will lead to more competition, even though creators are happy with Youtube overall, just not the content id system and demonetization button clickers. You can see this with artists relying on Patreon rather than Ad Sense at this point. Best quote I've heard, "Ad Sense is unreliable." About as pithy as you can get. Golden goose and all. You can read about 1900's sharecropping to understand more about what's happening here. After a sharecropper farmer gave 50% to the landowner and bought seed, he usually ended up with a barrel of supplies for the year's work. And often a bill for that too. After a Youtuber gets $0.00 for several months of work, it must feel just as bitter.
adelHBN 6y ago
I don't get it. These affiliate programs act like Amazon's sales team. Cutting 8% to 3% is a big cut. It reduces affiliate incentive to push Amazon products. It may also lead to lower quality websites. Amazon is cutting the hand that feeds it. It should be the other way around - they should increase affliate commission to incentivize more rigorous sales efforts.
- zapttt 6y ago
  or they reachead a sweet monopoly spot and those sales reps are competing among themselves.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Most (not all) of the sites and YouTube channels that focus on affiliate marketing are not what I'd call 'high quality'. They focus on pumping out shallow review after shallow review, with tons of cross-linking and spammy marketing techniques to get you to click on product links. There are exceptions, but cutting the profit margin for sites that were set up to basically push people to click Amazon links may make the search results for 'product xyz reviews' a lot more helpful instead of being 50 or so shallow reviews, then a couple decent ones buried in the deeper pages.
happybuy 6y ago
Amazon obviously feels they are now big enough and dominant enough in online commerce that they don't need the additional traffic affiliates provide. It seems that the common prevailing view (at least in the US) is that Amazon is some great, insurmountable e-commerce powerhouse. I'd argue that the UX of their core product (the Amazon e-commerce website) continues to be lacklustre and is an opportunity for a well-funded, strategic competitor. One example: try to find the list of all microwaves that Amazon sells and sort them by lowest to highest price. You can do a search for 'microwaves' and get a 'relevancy' list of products but it's filled with accessories, microwave adjacent products and other such junk. Key things that users would want to do are difficult and have been for years. The scale of their business and offering has made them complacent to issues such as this.
- Marsymars 6y ago
  > I'd argue that the UX of their core product (the Amazon e-commerce website) continues to be lacklustre and is an opportunity for a well-funded, strategic competitor. Hell, I'd argue that's it's gotten worse over time. > You can do a search for 'microwaves' and get a 'relevancy' list of products but it's filled with accessories, microwave adjacent products and other such junk. I routinely run into inexplicably broken searches on Amazon. Currently, if you search for "echo wall clock" on amazon.com, the Echo Wall Clock is not on the first page of results. (Don't know if it's on a later page.) If you search Google for "echo wall clock" the amazon.com page for it is the first result.

26 points by rexbee 6y ago

Does anyone know how big of a program this is for things like vox, go media (former gawker) etc? It seems like a huge rate cut and given that some sites have huge sections of their site dedicated to "buy on amazon" could this be a big hit?

pavelmark 6y ago
Hopefully (for them) they have their own agreements apart from the general populace.

redis_mlc 6y ago

Amazon, Youtube, etc. need to think about how their affiliates and content providers can afford to create content. I understand their strategy is to milk creators for all they're worth, and only increase payments after there's competition. But content creation is a very expensive job, and if the money isn't there, then fresh content will dwindle. I know that Youtube creators are already thinking in 2020, "since I'm going to be demonetized, why should I care about view count? I'll just do what I feel like doing from now on." This hurts both sides: fan engagement for the creator, and decreased impressions and ad revenue for Youtube. You can watch Rick Beato's annual rant on being demonetized and/or blocked, when usually our age-old fair use law should preclude that. Unfortunately, Youtube's Content ID system is a parallel and private copyright system, so doesn't have to consider fair use. And ultimately this will will lead to more competition, even though creators are happy with Youtube overall, just not the content id system and demonetization button clickers. You can see this with artists relying on Patreon rather than Ad Sense at this point. Best quote I've heard, "Ad Sense is unreliable." About as pithy as you can get. Golden goose and all. You can read about 1900's sharecropping to understand more about what's happening here. After a sharecropper farmer gave 50% to the landowner and bought seed, he usually ended up with a barrel of supplies for the year's work. And often a bill for that too. After a Youtuber gets $0.00 for several months of work, it must feel just as bitter.

adelHBN 6y ago

I don't get it. These affiliate programs act like Amazon's sales team. Cutting 8% to 3% is a big cut. It reduces affiliate incentive to push Amazon products. It may also lead to lower quality websites. Amazon is cutting the hand that feeds it. It should be the other way around - they should increase affliate commission to incentivize more rigorous sales efforts.

zapttt 6y ago
or they reachead a sweet monopoly spot and those sales reps are competing among themselves.
geerlingguy 6y ago
Most (not all) of the sites and YouTube channels that focus on affiliate marketing are not what I'd call 'high quality'. They focus on pumping out shallow review after shallow review, with tons of cross-linking and spammy marketing techniques to get you to click on product links. There are exceptions, but cutting the profit margin for sites that were set up to basically push people to click Amazon links may make the search results for 'product xyz reviews' a lot more helpful instead of being 50 or so shallow reviews, then a couple decent ones buried in the deeper pages.

happybuy 6y ago

Amazon obviously feels they are now big enough and dominant enough in online commerce that they don't need the additional traffic affiliates provide. It seems that the common prevailing view (at least in the US) is that Amazon is some great, insurmountable e-commerce powerhouse. I'd argue that the UX of their core product (the Amazon e-commerce website) continues to be lacklustre and is an opportunity for a well-funded, strategic competitor. One example: try to find the list of all microwaves that Amazon sells and sort them by lowest to highest price. You can do a search for 'microwaves' and get a 'relevancy' list of products but it's filled with accessories, microwave adjacent products and other such junk. Key things that users would want to do are difficult and have been for years. The scale of their business and offering has made them complacent to issues such as this.

Marsymars 6y ago
> I'd argue that the UX of their core product (the Amazon e-commerce website) continues to be lacklustre and is an opportunity for a well-funded, strategic competitor. Hell, I'd argue that's it's gotten worse over time. > You can do a search for 'microwaves' and get a 'relevancy' list of products but it's filled with accessories, microwave adjacent products and other such junk. I routinely run into inexplicably broken searches on Amazon. Currently, if you search for "echo wall clock" on amazon.com, the Echo Wall Clock is not on the first page of results. (Don't know if it's on a later page.) If you search Google for "echo wall clock" the amazon.com page for it is the first result.