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https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10f

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_... >Internally, Amazon thought that if they could force users to go straight to Amazon, offer a small but obviously less amount of money to charity from each customer than would have been paid to google, it would help kill customers going to google, save Amazon more money than paying google >The intent of the program was to be cost neutral - the amount Amazon donated to charities was about equal to the costs it saved by not having to pay Google for advertising clicks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34435338#34447006 >smile was invented as a way to bypass having to pay Google for the referral link

jefftk 4y ago
This doesn't make any sense. Amazon can choose to pay Google per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is already up to Amazon. They don't need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping. (Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google's estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they'll put in on your behalf are lower, and you'll lose lots of auctions you'd have preferred to win.) I would also be surprised if Amazon were paying Google on a per-conversion basis, since I bet Amazon wants to do their optimization in-house. Now, if you said this was a sneaky way to cut down on their affiliate commissions that could make sense. (I used to work at Google, on display ads, but none of the above is based on internal information).

jefftk 4y ago

This doesn't make any sense. Amazon can choose to pay Google per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is already up to Amazon. They don't need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping. (Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google's estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they'll put in on your behalf are lower, and you'll lose lots of auctions you'd have preferred to win.) I would also be surprised if Amazon were paying Google on a per-conversion basis, since I bet Amazon wants to do their optimization in-house. Now, if you said this was a sneaky way to cut down on their affiliate commissions that could make sense. (I used to work at Google, on display ads, but none of the above is based on internal information).