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Amazon makes money from selling ads so it is in their best interest to make the non-ad search worse.

• belval 5y ago
  That is so comically inaccurate. Amazon made about $9B in advertising against half a trillion in revenue. That's like 2% of their revenue.
  • JaimeThompson 5y ago
    31 billion if this is correct [1] almost all of which is much higher margin then product sales. If the user buys product anyway from amazon they make either way. [1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazons-advertising-revenue-is-dollar31-billion-and-growing-heres-everything-we-know-about-its-booming-ad-business/ar-BB1aJqz6 https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/amazons-advertisin...
  • wpietri 5y ago
    That's the wrong baseline to use. Their total profit for 2021 was $33B. Most of their sales revenue is going to be low margin, whereas ads will be very high margin. Moreover, it's not clear that the two revenue sources are in competition. Advertising generally boosts demand. So it's possible that they win twice with ads: once for getting you to click on it and once when you buy the product. And given that the purpose of ads is to distort normal market outcomes, maybe they get even more when you come back and buy the right thing.