Bezos famously says Amazon's "secret sauce" is "obsessive compulsive focus on the customer." Isn't this move at odds with that focus? Customers don't want to see ads.
> Bezos famously says Amazon's "secret sauce" is "obsessive compulsive focus on the customer." Isn't this move at odds with that focus?
So is not dealing with commingling. Amazon's focus is on driving down costs, and finding every way to leverage existing position for additional revenue. The claim of customer focus is true only to the extent of finding and greasing every possible route between the customer’s wallet and Amazon's bottom line. Anything else is (as one should expect of any executive’s public statements) simply PR.
Commingling helps consumers (they get products quicker) and has very little downside. Typically people who are saying it does don't realize that Amazon still tracks which seller sold any particular unit regardless of which order Amazon shipped it for. If A sells a unit and Amazon ships B's inventory to fulfill it faster, Amazon still knows to get A in trouble if there's an issue.
It isn't. Without commingling I know for a fact that if I buy from Amazon I'm going to get a genuine product (I don't really think Amazon acquires their stock through grey channels). With commingling, I no longer the guarantee of knowing which seller's stock I'm receiving.
The customer loses valuable information and decision power with commingling, especially important in these bazaar-type situations.
>I don't really think Amazon acquires their stock through grey channels
There are plenty of vendors selling to Amazon that aren't the brand owner. Look up Apple vs Mobile Star, they sued a company that was selling (allegedly) fake products to Amazon as a vendor that showed up as "sold by Amazon", nothing to do with commingling.
And the fraction of customers that care about choosing which seller to buy from is low, compared to those who care about price and speed of shipping.
Amazon turns off commingling on high risk products, fwiw.
Internally at Amazon, the definition of customer depends on the team. For 3rd party seller team seller is a customer. And so for the advertisement team, advertisers are customer. When they say customer obsession this is what is meant.
In times of conflict though (e.g., marketplace team and Single Detail Page team when it comes to amount of data to be loaded Vs page latency) the decision is usually made in favour of Customer, i.e., buyer.
Bezos' secret sauce is being at the right place at the right time. Once you capture the market you can define what you think made you successful. This is just a finely curated marketing sound bite to 'ouuuhh' and 'ahhhhh' the public into thinking that amazon is 'good'
Not just luck. Amazon started in '94, but they didn't have to charge sales taxes in most US states, giving them a regulatory loophole advantage that lasted well past 2010. Plus their survival in the early days also had to do with the millions in venture capital propping them up for a decade until they finally became profitable in 2004.
why are you quoting luck? I didn't say it, but somehow you conjecture that bezos won the lottery. Absolutely false: he is the _right_ person to execute, among a pool of a lot of other people capable of executing at the same level as him. To have 5-10 years of running a business without competition (AWS) is almost unheard of. He wouldn't have been able to do it pre commoditization of virtualization technology.
edit: Bah to a certain extent you're right, plenty of tech is before its time and me saying being at the right place at the right time is a hind-sight 20-20 sort of comment. What I'm trying to say is I think lots of people have the same vision. Some people have it too early, some have it too late, and some have it at the time where the stars align: customers get it, VC gets it, and your company gets and and has the ability to execute on it.
long story short I hope we can agree that while the ability to execute is a requirement it simply isn't enough.
"right place at right time" implies luck was the direct result of Amazon rather than any kind of underlying skill. I'm certainly not suggesting luck didn't play a role, but I'm happily suggesting that you're implication was that luck was the primary factor. I disagree.
The biggest example to me that Amazon no longer cares about the customer is their experience for non-Prime users. Random, regular items like Blu-ray discs or diapers will randomly get marked as "Prime Exclusive", and cannot be ordered from Amazon without a Prime subscription, even at a higher price. Prime Exclusive items are, mystifyingly, not even a better price, and usually the same or cheaper elsewhere. Amazon is literally giving you the choice to get Prime or shop elsewhere, and... I go shop elsewhere. Completely mystifying decision on Amazon's part.
Amazon just seems to enjoy screwing with anyone who doesn't have Prime, and has done it for years. It's never gotten a lot of coverage because of the pervasiveness of Prime: Anyone reading this comment probably never knew this, because they already had Prime.
Not only this, but ridiculously long shipping times for non-Prime members.
My last two orders (over a year ago at this point) took 9 and 11 days to get to me. These were two-day ground shipments, and the products were in stock and fulfilled by Amazon. They simply let them sit for a week, and then shipped the slowest method possible.
This is obviously a ploy for me to sign up for Prime. I'll simply shop elsewhere. Amazon's prices are basically retail at this point, anyways. They used to have lots of deals, but I rarely see that on items I shop for these days.
> The biggest example to me that Amazon no longer cares about the customer is their experience for non-Prime users.
That's the thing - you're not an Amazon customer if you don't subscribe to Prime. You're the merchant's customer, you just happen to be shopping through Amazon's site.
Not to interrupt HN's favorite you're-not-the-customer meme, but Amazon takes 8-15% commission from sales. Everyone that buys on Amazon is Amazon's customer making Amazon money.
Well we can extend that logic to the absurd pretty easily, can't we:
You're the affiliate sites customer.
You're the vendors customer.
You're the VISA/Mastercard's customer.
You're the gateway/merchant account providers customer.
People need to learn to accept that you simply aren't Amazon's customer unless you buy direct from them, in very much the same way you aren't eBay's customer.
First: You can buy straight from Amazon even if you don't have Prime.
Second: Using their store makes you their customer. If I go into a store and buy a product, giving them my credit card number to purchase merchandise they advertised, that store can't claim that I'm not really their customer, that they're just a distribution platform for the manufacturer, and that they're not responsible for the counterfeit they just sold me.
First: I was responding to someone who was using an explicit example of not buying straight from Amazon.
Second: The courts strongly disagree with you. You are drawing a thin line between marketplace and vendor. As far as the courts are concerned, they are not the same thing, and you absolutely do not have the exact same protections you would in purchasing directly.
> That's the thing - you're not an Amazon customer if you don't subscribe to Prime. You're the merchant's customer, you just happen to be shopping through Amazon's site.
No, he's probably still the customer. Amazon still sells things itself (that's what "Ships from and sold by Amazon.com" means). Amazon Marketplace is just part or Amazon.com.
As someone currently doing this: I miss nothing. Walmart offers free 2-day shipping on most goods I would typically order from Amazon, and often cheaper. Best Buy has whatever tech thing I want, I get it same-day, and price-matched at Amazon, and I know it isn't counterfeit. Most book publishers (my original reason for using Amazon) have long ditched the platform and directed me towards ordering direct from them which usually nets me reduced price/shipping. Apple music is better than Amazon Music. Audible is separate anyways, having Prime didn't help me out much there. Netflix is better than Amazon streaming, and so on.
The biggest benefit so far? I am generally ordering less stuff overall. I felt like I had to order x amount of stuff to make my prime membership "worth it", but it was never "worth it". It just resulted in me spending more money with Amazon, even if I had better alternatives around me.
Yeah, I definitely order less without Prime than when I have Prime. Part of this is that $25 free shipping minimum: I'll hesitate to order cheap things if I have to pay for shipping, so I wait until I have an order that's at least $25, and sometimes then end up never ordering them at all.
And I also use a fair bit of Walmart and Best Buy ordering now. Both do ship to store as well, though Walmart's is annoyingly lackluster because in-store pickup closes early in the day.
> Walmart offers free 2-day shipping on most goods I would typically order from Amazon,
Yeah because WalMart is just a bastion of ethics. Why not support local businesses? I guess you have to ask what you goal is in quitting Amazon - if it's "sticking it to the man", buying stuff from WalMart is probably even worse, ethically.
If you pull out a big enough "ethics" magnifying glass, you will find ethical flaws in every corporation. One can make the argument, depending on where on the "woke sliding scale" you may lie, that shopping at Walmart is better for the environment than Amazon: they already have a streamlined, efficient supply chain and logistics operation. Amazon relies on a myriad of logistical networks, with many inefficiencies still yet to be solved. But again, not the reason I am shopping/not shopping there.
It has nothing to do with sticking it to anyone. Amazon doesn't have the same value proposition as it once did. I realized I was using it just to use it, among other reasons.
If by local you mean funnel their money back to corporate headquarters, while simultaneously driving up social welfare costs through shit wages and even more shit healthcare benefits, then yes, it's a local business.
My Prime membership has actually lapsed today when I have had it since it launched. Since then it has increased by $50, 2 day prime option seems to be unavailable for items not warehoused locally, and my shipping has changed to gig economy delivery which results in unpredictable delivery times and lost packages.
In addition Amazon has become why I stopped shopping at eBay. Unreliable products from China or outright fakes. Ironically I go to eBay now when I want some genuine tool or part as I can get it used from a US liquidator. Combine that with that I don't really care about Prime videos or "Prime exclusive offers" (which are really fake discounted Chinese goods for the most part)
I just bought a ton of outdoor gear and consistently found other websites such as Backcountry, Moosejaw and REI to be significantly cheaper. Was usually 2-3 day shipping which isn't much worse than Prime's 2 day.
Prime's 2-day shipping often took more than two days for me anyway. And there's nothing more than an apology "sorry, your package is taking longer than expected" when that happens.
I'm considering doing the same. I have an Amazon Prime Visa Rewards card that will go from being 5% cashback to 3% on purchases at Amazon and Whole Foods, and I'll lose the ability to use the Twitch Prime subscription or use Amazon Video, but I don't think I will miss them.
I opened a Jet/Wal-mart account just because of this BS. I wanted a niche power tool from an Amazon reseller. Too bad. It's Prime exclusive. Same reseller had it on Wal-mart.
this is just not true, and only describes a very specific subset of advertisement. for a very large portion of ads, the advertisers want people to see it even if it doesn't translate to a direct sale of something the user already wanted.
Disney does not expect someone to see an ad for Disney World and immediately win a click-through conversion for a $2k vacation. They do expect to remain relevant, and the ads have "worked" when Disney pops into mind when I try to plan my next vacation. So they make sure to continue to advertise to families.
> Disney does not expect someone to see an ad for Disney World and immediately win a click-through conversion for a $2k vacation
Having run CPC campaigns many times, companies do care about conversion rates. However, you are tracked across multiple sites and days. But companies do want to know who converted after seeing the ad and who converted after clicking the ad.
So, you're right they might not care that you convert immediately. But they do care that people convert over time or they'll pull the ad.
You're conflating direct response with awareness marketing, which are both valid. It is a concept of information theory for imperfect markets.
In a perfect market, the consumer and seller know everything about each other and every other product and service that they could conceivably ever want.
Since we live with imperfect markets, consumers do not have all the information about everything on the market. Sellers will pay money to communicate to consumers about their brand, product, service, etc. A percentage of consumers will be aware of this seller the next time they research or consider making a purchase decision.
The perfect ad is only shown the consumers that it is relevant to. Search/display ads are still not perfect, but they're closer to this than previous mediums of communication.
If you presume rational choice theory is true except for the assumption of complete information, and presume that ads always improve the overall accuracy of information and thus justify the leap from “induced into a transaction by the presence of ads” to “wants ads”, sure.
However, this is obviously false in many respects.
Are you not convinced that Google Search, DDG, Gmail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat are all "good" products in the eye of many people? As far as I can tell, all of those products are paid for by sponsors.
These platforms have been coasting on network effects alone for years. The "I'd quit but I have no other way to stay in touch with (friends/family/whoever)." / "but all my (whoever) are on it" justifications you constantly see from people are evidence to support that.
I wouldn't be too sure. There was a time where there were plenty of online competitors for purchasing such items, and what made Amazon stand out was user accessibility. Once he won that market, for sure he was just lucky with the timing to hit the billions.
This strange assumption keeps perpetuated at HN as if it was the only possible opinion - but it's far from it. Personally, most of the ads I see on the internet are next versions of my favourite products, their next versions and related offerings, and I generally enjoy them and seldom click through to actually purchase something. And from talking to a lot of non-tech people, I actually tend to think that there's a lot more of people with similar experience that are just very silent in the whole ad debate.
There's a weird duality in ads based on their quality. As a customer, I most certainly do want to see ads if they're for things I'm interested in. I don't want to see ads for things I don't care about, though. I'd say most ads nowadays aim to be in the former group, which makes them helpful. Whether they actually make it into that group is up to implementation, but the intent is to be something customers want to see.
My impression is that if someone paid for placement, Amazon will label the items as such.
So in a detail page you'll see "Frequently bought together" (not paid placement), "Sponsored products related to this item" (paid), "Customers who bought this item also bought" (not paid).
Whether or not you think it's an ad is up to you... they're all trying to get you to buy more. :-)
> I do not want my buying habits mined , bought and sold, etc. They are my property and not subject to the whimms of amazon or any other company.
In order to make a purchase of X it is required that another party exists to make a sale of X. Let's call this transaction A. Why do you believe that the metadata of transaction A is owned solely by the purchaser and is not equally owned by the seller?
Even further, is there really a differentiation between the purchaser and the seller? It's really just an exchange of a good or service for dollars where the "buyer" is the one with the dollars and the "seller" is the one with the good or service.
Also any offline store where you pay for something with a credit card. For me the convenience of not having to deal with cash on a daily basis is worth it. I can see how others would take a different viewpoint, but one really has to be cash-only if they want to avoid their financial habits being data-mined.
Yep, if you buy something from walmart.com with a credit card and later go to a physical walmart and buy something else with that same credit card then that item you bought in store will show up on your walmart.com account.
I signed up for motorcycle classes and they said to bring glasses or goggles.
I hopped on Amazon and realized I don't trust any of the things they sell to not be fake/junk/something I don't want near my eyes.
I still ended up buying some because I don't really have time to get to the store, but I spent money to try and get a more repubtable brand. Hopefully they aren't fake.
I've been having a similar experience myself. I bought a ladder off amazon, and one of the rungs broke off while I was leaning over my roof. They refunded, but I'll never buy another tool on Amazon again.
When you first get your credit card, it comes with a bunch of forms by law, one of which is an opt out form for selling your data to third parties for marketing. You have to call a number and go through some steps
If you are using gmail, you are already giving all of that to google. Google tracks all your purchases. Not trying to contradict your point but just saying that it happens irrespective of whether you use Amazon or not
Does anyone else feel disgust towards the world we live in? Everywhere you look, you get adds thrown in your face.
Facebook is marketing to your profile, not just paid adds but people with their business.
You meet a new person in a café they tell you about their business and try to sell stuff...
You dare to go online with your smartphone and there's a million apps updating and when you open them they throw more adds in your face.
can I demand my attention back please?
It sucks and i agree its kinda awful but change how you live your life? (if possible of course) I rarely see any ads these days.
I don't listen to the radio or watch TV
I dns ad block my home network with pihole, my phone with adguard
I double down with ublock origin and other privacy plugins on my computers
I don't use facebook or instagram all that much
I pay the 15$ a month for spotify family and share with 3 friends
I don't put up with people trying to sell me things, it's easy to say hey I hate to interrupt you but i'm honestly not interested.
sometimes i see a youtube ad while casting and i'm usually genuinely surprised.
only when i am on fb or instagram i see ads reliably and when i do they are at the very least relevant to my life, sometimes amusingly scammy, but always easily ignored.
the only place ads are ubiquitous are in the real world and while ugly they are easy to ignore. I do wish it was against the law to have large public advertisements, public art would be an immense improvement.
Honestly it's come to a point that when I'm at my parents or in a car with a friend who listens to radio i'm fascinated by the ads because its maybe been a decade since i've been exposed to them with any frequency.
You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume? I say this in earnest. We had great content in newspapers and magazines... and the world decide that cheap ( with instance access ) was better. Same has happened to many industries.
You shouldn't demand, without a willingness to, well, compensate.
> You can demand your attention back, but are you willing to pay for the content you consume?
Yes, I do.
In fact, I want to consume a lot less than the media corporations want me to consume (especially 'news'). So paying for Netflix/Spotify/Prime/Steam is no problem for me and I probably would pay for news if I would find it of any value. Today, every news corporation seems to have its own agenda and you have to do your own research anyway.
I am just wondering how much I would have to pay to get the other stuff without that DRM garbage... I mean for games we have GOG, but for movies and music, I haven't found a legal DRM-free source yet that offers the main-stream products :-/
With magazines with a narrow focus, such as magazines about a particular hobby or activity, readers usually wanted the ads.
I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment.
Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte".
For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them.
Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.
I think my point is that the "bombardment" of ads is partly in due to the lack of monetization. There's a bit of a difference between print ads, and intrusive online ads. For example, you could turn the page... there was not redirect to "wow iphone user, you've won this prize!!!"
I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.
Those ads are relevant, because they are context-specific and purchased directly from the publisher. If I pick up The Economist, I will expect to see ads for some luxury watch brand, as well as highly specialized job postings for executives somewhere.
If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for:
- a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser
- the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different).
- the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are.
These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.
This is not even true. I just went to the Economist website and I got exactly the same ads you claim for the print version:
- Louis Vuitton watch ad
- Accenture strategy ad about company purpose
(served by Google DoubleClick)
Hmm, I just checked again and you are right, I was wrong. Perhaps they changed their digital ads strategy, as the last time I visited on a non-adblocked browser, it was showing those low-grade ads that really cheapened the experience of being on the site.
Google used to allow you to pay pennies to websites to hide display ads their site, or replace them entirely with cat pictures. It wasn't complete coverage since Google doesn't own all ad networks, but it was something like 55% of the ads on sites.
Then they changed the whole program to only have 100% coverage on very specific sites, which kind of makes it useless unless you frequent those specific domains: https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/7324995
Well, the other side would be: how about stop throwing free stuff at me that I don't need anyways? But since it's already there, sure, I'll consume it?
The market tought people to be like this.
I never click on adds, and I never buy what's advertized in an add, what's the market value of that?
For a while, I tried what everyone else tried: "like and subscribe, like and comment!" but 1. it didn't work and 2. I felt more and more disgusted with myself.
3. I had a friend, who did this, stuck with it and became very weird, always hunting for agreement, couldn't take any feedback at all (unless it was positive and stroking her ego).
All this stuff is reshaping human behaviour, and nobody knows what it's doing.
4. All adds are telling you that something is missing and that you need it. Be it software or hardware, creams and food. Essentially the message in a lot of these things is: you're inefficient, ugly, slow, unproductive, uncreative, too thick, too thin... Who wants to listen to that kind of message all the time?
Yes. I pay 50bucks to a youtuber per video who does not advertise, and disables them wherever possible (sometimes its forced by yt/twitch). Lots of people do not support him on patreon, but he says that the few people who pay make him more money than he would get with ads.
I would rather pay those 10$ per month or so that websites get through ads (per user), rather than getting tracked and stalked everywhere I go.
I disagree. This is sort of like saying it’s fine to build a restaurant with two large rooms, one that has cigarette smoke piped into it, and one with fresh, clean air. You can sit in the smoke filled room for no additional charge, but you have to sign up for a subscription plan with that restaurant to be allowed in the clean air room.
Now imagine that every restaurant does this. And your grocery store, doctor’s office, airplane seat and place of worship too. To escape it, you’d literally have to become an alienating, dysfunctional hermit disavowed of all kinds of modern standards of living, hypervigilant with every place you visit.
So it is with ads. Nine times out of ten, there is not even any option you can pay for that is truly ad free. Even full paying subscribers are subjected to ads and have their data and consumption habits tracked to build better ad bidding techniques or demographic profiles.
Ads are essentially always a toxic psychological substance, and especially so when their injection into your life is nearly impossible to fully comprehend and relies on personal data about you that is sprawling, with huge companies and teams of engineers designing ways to defeat any expected privacy you might have believed you’re entitled to. Tracking pixels, cookies, browser fingerprinting, data bartering, location tracking SDKs, etc.
There’s an aspect of this where we simply need to legislate away hyper-targeted and constant, pervasive advertising, just like we would have a public health outcry if a restaurant tried to create a room artificially filled with cigarette smoke.
Ads are truly not different. They are a psychological carcinogen and people should have a natural right to avoid being subjected to them while conducting everyday modern life activities. We should disallow the possibility that the only way to avoid an ad is to avoid the content / pay a rent-seeking additional fee for ad-free access, etc. It’s not acceptable to inject a harmful substance into a product and then argue customers are free to not consume it or pay extra for the harmful substance to be removed.
Ads should not be viewed as a logically possible monetization instrument for reasons of sheer public health.
If this means many types of businesses fold because they were only sustainable if they monetized the injection of harmful substances into their customers’ lives, then let them fold. It means they do not provide compelling enough products or services to be justified by the marketplace, and are propped up by a philistine ethical abyss in our modern economy that tries to convince people it’s above board to make money from injecting harmful substances into customers’ lives or charging a premium to avoid the harmful substance.
We wouldn’t allow businesses to monetize based on injecting cigarette smoke into customers’ lives (not even if the mostly uninformed customers claimed to be OK with it). It’s frankly no different with ads.
Nobody is going to read that wall of text, but the first and last paragraphs give me the gist if what you're trying to say.
Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?
Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.
If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise.
> “Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?”
The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.
Whatever value proposition the service is claiming, whether it’s news delivery, a communication feed with friends, whatever, if it cannot be self-sustaining without ads then it is a non-business thing; it is not a business at that point, because predicating the financial viability of a thing on the activity of injecting a harmful substance into customers’ lives instantly renders it a non-business... a thing that the market has demonstrated to be unwanted and worthy of losing money unto the point of shutting down as a side-effect of it not being viable outside the scope of hurting people.
We can definitely debate about degrees of the problem, as long as such debates are based on measuring and quantifying the harmful effects of ads and associated privacy intrusion, and are not disingenuously framed in terms of a customers purported self willingness to endure ads for the service. It’s not a thing a person can in principle be informed enough about to give that consent; it’s a vehicle of psychological harm where the perpetrators have a huge asymmetric information advantage and a huge lobbying advantage.
In all earnesty and seriousness, it is exactly like the kind of harm perpetrated by cigarette companies, with asymmetric knowledge of bodily harm and limitless marketing budgets and a supply of die-hard customers ready to say how willing they are to make that harm trade off to consume the product.
> If you’re not going to read things you dismiss, please don’t reply. It just adds unhelpful noise.
I skimmed your post, and read the first, last, and a few in-between paragraphs. It's incredibly verbose, repetitive, and wordy, and repetitive to the point of not helping you make your point. I'm not dismissing your point without reading it, though.
> The whole point is that if these services cannot be self-sustaining without monetization of ad injection, then the service is thereby demonstrably harmful to the people it delivers the service to.
You make this assertion, which is a huge one, then fail to really support it at all. You leave no room for nuance, and ignore the value that people do derive from free services like Facebook or Google. Your initial assumption is "ads are bad", and anything that has ads is therefore bad, and that's where your train of thought ends. It’s adding nothing to the discussion.
> “I skimmed your post, and read the first, last, and a few in-between paragraphs. It's incredibly verbose, repetitive, and wordy, and repetitive to the point of not helping you make your point. I'm not dismissing your point without reading it, though.”
This appears to precisely be a statement that you are dismissing it without reading it.
> “You leave no room for nuance”
Again, had you read the post, you’d have seen you’re wrong on this, as I granted that it would be possible to debate about the degrees of harm that different kinds of ads and associated data tracking can cause, as long as that debate is not based on any notion of self willingness of consumers to claim they are OK with the ad-harm-for-free-service trade off, since it is not possible for anyone on the consumer side of that equation to have enough of the information to make such a claim.
If instead it is based on actual quantified measures of harm, then you could ask whether there’s a way to make thresholds and classify some ad-based services as “safe enough for consumption” likely through clear regulation.
Also, without resorting to let-me-google-that-for-you link spam about all that has been written about ads causing harm, I also think there is a philosophical divide here that your mind seems entirely closed to.
It is totally fair to simply say “all ads are bad” or perhaps a slightly more qualified version “all ads based on personalized targeting criteria or narrow behavior-defined audience segmentation are bad.” For example, someone may just hold that targeted, personalized ads violate an intrinsic right to privacy, or that they come with unacceptably high risks that such behavioral data will be misused or stolen, and that a person should, morally, have a right to control the spread of that information or know the extent to which it was used to possibly manipulate them.
These things can just be statements of universal rights, and not necessarily rooted in any other observable outcome. Many people consider being targeted by behavior for an ad to be the harm, intrinsically.
This could in fact be a moral stance akin to saying “things that cause diseases are bad” in the smoking debate.
Pushing back and replying by saying “things that cause diseases are bad” is but a mere assertion is a pretty self-evidently vapid and useless reply. It’s basically table stakes of even entering the discussion at all to take as a premise that causing diseases is bad enough that unless the offsetting value was gigantic, such causes should be controlled and prevented.
It’s no different with ads. Lazy claims of oh but the value people get to stay connected or watch TV for free just don’t cut it. That approach doesn’t need rebuked, it’s just wrong. Baldly asserting that it’s wrong is perfectly fine.
It didn't use to be better? In TV, breaking movies by ads is a long-established practice (as is product placement); advertisements defined genres as "soap operas" long before internet was a thing; newspapers and magazines were always covered with ads.
Internet used to be different, but not really that much, ads were always there (1-millionth customer is an old internet trope, etc).
Beyond the annoyance of the ads themselves, there is a serious problem of misaligned incentives in the current environment. Online content platforms are incentivized to show me content that will get them the most clicks so that they can get more ad impressions, even if that content leads me down a path of hate, ignorance, or self-destruction.
What I loathe - to my very core - is most of the social networking ecosystem that's developed to support ad delivery.
The constant whinging, outrage, passive-aggressiveness, and superficiality on display via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others is deeply disheartening.
Pre-social media, the internet wasn't this shrieking cacophony that we have now.
You can have it back: simply turn off and don't use these things. Will life be less convenient? Yeah, probably, but do you value your convenience more than the negatives? If so, it seems unreasonable of you to make demands.
I would also like my attention back. However it doesn't look like advertising is going away any time soon, quite the opposite. Too many people are invested in it as a business model, including many in tech.
If ads are the biggest problem you face in the world, you have had a pretty easy life. I wish people had half as much passion as they do against ads, against more impactful things like hunger, disease and war.
Also, ads really don't bother me that much. Perhaps, I can afford to pay for everything I consume without ads, but some people don't have the means to. I am glad that ads allow some people to access content freely or provide them cheaper goods. There are actually times ads have helped me find a product I enjoy, I assume for most normal people this is true also.
What I find more annoying than ads, is all the self-righteous complaining about ads.
What I find more annoying than ads, is all the self-righteous complaining about ads.
Don't those mega billboards annoy you? Don't the auto playing audio/video ads annoy you?
You get on the subway, there are ads (and you've paid for the ticket, it is not even you are traveling free). You drive on the street, there are huge billboards everywhere. You switch on the TV, there are ads. You open a bank account, the bank sells your address and the very next week you get junk in the mail. How many of these are voluntary?
How is it self-righteous to expect a quiet, clutter free life/atmosphere? Almost all ads are ugly, annoying and they are full of lies.
There are actually times ads have helped me find a product I enjoy
How often is this true? Maybe one ad in a thousand is useful, it isn't worth watching the other 999 junk
So... I used to hate ads, and especially (real-life) billboards. I was convinced a world without public advertising would be better.
Then I spent a long weekend in São Paulo (Brazil), a mega-city which had banned all outdoor advertising a couple of years prior.
It was... a profoundly boring urban environment. Until then, I'd never imagined just how much advertising adds color, faces, humanity, and dynamism to a city.
I dunno. I still feel like I dislike ads in principle... but then in practice the world feels empty without them. Think of when you open a magazine from 80 years ago, the ads can be the most interesting part. They're part of our cultural fabric.
I still don't what to think, but I know it's more complicated than "ads are bad".
This just blew my mind a bit. It made me think of how corporations are like giant organisms, and their ads are like mating calls that drive their thriving and reproduction.
Is advertising not an enormous part of modern culture? It's certainly not the only kind, but it's where we've allocated tons of resources to provoke and stimulate.
Yeah, if you have absolutely nothing then of course it's going to look boring. Instead, fill that space with art and murals: way more pleasant and it adds a lot of culture to your city. I don't recall which city it was, but there was one in Europe that removed advertising from their train stations and replaced it with art pieces.
I think you are massively underestimating just how much ads pay for, and how much economic activity they drive. If you remove ads, the prices for everything would increase massively (even after accounting for the lack of advertising costs) and even fewer people could afford it.
Sure there are definitely places that have too much, and the overall implementation and UX of ads online is poor, but advertising itself has enabled a lot of people to have access to many things they otherwise would never have.
“If you remove ads, the prices for everything would increase massively (even after accounting for the lack of advertising costs) and even fewer people could afford it.”
This doesn’t really make sense. Why would prices go up? The only reason i could see is that without ads people would buy less stuff
I’m not at all confident these economics are true, but I imagine the argument is this: products like music, news, tv, Facebook, google search, YouTube (any ad-supported media) will now have to cost money. Their prices clearly have to go up without ads.
Next are all the businesses that will have a harder time attracting as many customers as they used to with ads- with fewer customers one can imagine they will have to raise prices as well to sustain their business.
Last, without advertising it will be much harder to start a new business. If you don’t have a highly visible store front it will be tough to gain traction no matter what sort of business you’re in. This leads to lower competition overall which also means higher prices.
I like a good billboard. Commutes are boring, but some billboards make me smile. I'll always enjoy the 'If you lived here, you'd be home by now' billboards or Snowflake's awful data-based one-liners.
Not the person you responded to, but I'll take a stab:
> Don't those mega billboards annoy you?
No. They don't impact my life whatsoever.
> Don't the auto playing audio/video ads annoy you?
The auto-playing ones like what you get on a news page, yes. The ones that play before a video on YouTube, no.
> You get on the subway, there are ads (and you've paid for the ticket, it is not even you are traveling free).
Don't even notice them most of the time. Sometimes they're mildly funny. Can't remember ever being bothered by one.
> You switch on the TV, there are ads.
I don't really watch TV (I guess that's a pretentious response), but when I do I just ignore the ads I'm not interested in. They don't annoy me.
> You open a bank account, the bank sells your address and the very next week you get junk in the mail.
Are you sure it's the bank doing this, and not the post office? In any case it's moving the goal posts a bit, because this is not advertising per se. It's data collection in service to advertising. I find it annoying, but not because I get junk mail. I don't find junk mail annoying, I throw it out without reading it. In fact I don't really read any physical mail.
> How is it self-righteous to expect a quiet, clutter free life/atmosphere?
Yeah but that's not the claim, is it? The person is saying it's self-righteous to constantly complain about advertising because it feels like a soapbox. In point of fact, I consider my life to be plenty quiet and clutter-free and I live in the same advertising-filled world you do.
There are legitimate reasons to dislike advertising. Sometimes ads are a vector for spreading malware, and the peripheral incentive structures are arguably unethical (particularly concerning the use and collection of consumer data). But quite a lot of complaining about advertising doesn't treat the subject with that level of intellectual engagement or nuance. Instead it's just impassioned yelling into a void about how unfair advertising is, or how unaesthetic the world is because of it.
I can see how that would become grating after a while, because on sites like HN and reddit you don't find nearly as many people e.g. crusading against climate change, disease, destitute poverty or hunger. It's actually a downvotable offense for someone to say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty okay with ads though!"
This is why the person you're responding to reacted that way. It's hard to take seriously the idea that the world is "disgusting" because of billboards. That's kind of a hyperbolic way of saying the world isn't the way you want it to be, isn't it?
I'm a Deep-Ecologist who is concerned about the large human population of consumers impacting global biodiversity so I see "things like hunger, disease and war" as natures way of keeping a species at bay. Although we seem to have outsmarted the laws of nature in the last 500 years.
No i don't think killing people is the best option. I obviously would rather reduce human consumption through other means.
> I am glad that ads ... provide them cheaper goods
There's always a cost to indulgence or easy living. Our children will pay it if we don't.
(I know my comment is dark but the parent comment mentioned "disgust towards the world we live in" so its relevant.)
The thing that bothers me isn't so much ads themselves, but the implicit meaning behind them: consumption. It's simply not a sustainable business or ecological model.
To be fair, I don’t think the original poster ever suggested that ads were the biggest problem they faced in the world.
You’re not wrong in some respects, but I think it’s useful to have a dialogue on the subject of increasing (and perhaps invasive) advertising, rather than dismiss it because there are also people starving in the world.
Practically everything pales into insignificance in the face of hunger, disease and war. Let's just give up on everything!
And I note your positive points on ads, and agree. But come on, generally they're absolute sh!t. They slow the web down, they interfere with productivity, they deceive, they aren't clever. One in 1000 is actually funny. They're crap. I could go on.
Nowhere in the OP's post did they suggest that ads were their "biggest problem." You took it upon yourself to project that onto them and their comment. This post is about one of the world's most valuable companies getting into the ad business, the OP's comment is not out of place. There's was also nothing even remotely "self-righteous" about their comment. Lastly your own sentiment that you are glad that "ads allow some people to access content freely" is completely absurd and wildly misplaced in the context of Amazon. Exactly nothing on Amazon is free.
If people being upset about ads is the biggest problem you face, you have had a pretty easy life. What about more impactful things like war and disease?
Advertising is often a form of propaganda that leads us to inadvertently allow the issues of hunger, disease and war to continue. Advertisers basically say whatever they want to us skirting on the edge of any existing regulation to get ahead.
The fact that corporations can use advertising as a tool to manipulate your emotions is something that is fundamentally undemocratic.
Most websites offer no option to remove adverts. I will simply use an adblocker on all my devices. If this means free services go away and I have to pay for them now then that is ok by me.
Honestly? No. I suppose I've just developed filters that means I pretty much never notice any of them unless a comment like this draws my attention to it.
I don't see how this is a threat to Google or Facebook. Amazon isn't encroaching in their ad spaces. They're just placing ads in their own site. (And they already do some of this)
Regardless, I think it's a bad move. If there's one thing I'd dislike more than having to scroll though a few pages of miscategorized items, it's having to go through more ads to do it.
Amazon has the best data on user purchase history. They are already building the tech for displaying mobile ads and ML based targeting behind the scenes. The choice to show them only in the Amazon app is a business decision and not a technical limitation. One day some VP from the ads team will make a fancy presentation to Bezos on how Amazon could make a killing by supporting more mobile apps and then the business direction will change instantaneously. This day is the threat to existing ad platforms.
The data they collect on users is the threat to google or Facebook. That means they can have better targeting and start their own ad network.
If commerce based data is better than search or “like” based data (which it should be) then they can offer a more cost effective platform. This is a direct shot across the bow.
Product advertising isn't necessarily better than search or social advertising, it's just different. It's unlikely that amazon will be competitive with FB on political advertising, advertising for events, local advertising, ect.
But what would their own ad network run on besides their own e-commerce ecosphere? It leaves google and facebook with their unique offerings, and simply adds a third. Unless you think advertising dollars would shift from google to amazon?
I wonder if in addition to mainly physical products and entertainment subscriptions, Amazon could serve up ads for any product outside their control.
They already do “sponsored”. But what if they index just about anything people buy? Insurance, Cars, Dell, Dropbox, etc., and undercut the clutter (non commerce results in SERPs). Many people skip Google searches when looking to buy things and go first to Amazon; why not add commerce in general?
"Amazon is requiring a $35,000 ad budget to run the spots at 5 cents per view to run the ads for 60 days"
This pretty much excludes small to mid-sized sellers. They are obviously targeting bigger companies with bigger budgets.
With that in mind, I don't see it as a competitor to Google/YouTube or Facebook YET. If they open it up to lower budget campaigns, I can absolutely see it making a dent in YouTube ads.
The idea that Amazon will pose an actual threat to Google (audience breadth) or FB (audience granularity) is nuts. Just how I'm sure Apple also really felt it when Amazon released the Fire Phone.
Except that's not how it works. Facebook, Google and Amazon have very similar audience outreach in the US. If you're company in US market with an online advertising budget of 100K, and you were spending that budget on Facebook and Google, you might also start considering Amazon.
Of course it's a threat. Any company in this situation can shift part of their online advertising budget to Amazon, at the expense of ad dollars that were previously spent on Facebook or Google.
Since reddit/Twitter/Snap wasn't a threat, I highly doubt Amazon will be. The fact that agencies might spend a few bucks here and there to "try out Amazon ads" is beside the point. As someone that has been working in ad tech for about 5 years now, I don't think you truly appreciate the reach and level of optimization FB & GOOG have.
I think you're underestimating how incredibly dominant can Amazon be. Amazon is not Reddit/Twitter/Snap. They literally can do bulldozer moves into industries. Their ad placements are also very valuable. They already have the purchase intent that lacks in any of the examples you mentioned.
Last year Amazon did $10B in ad sales. That was double the year before. Google did about $130B for the same time period. Doesn't seem nuts to me that Amazon can grow their share of the pie quickly. They are #3 globally now.
For context, AWS did about $25B and everyone raves about how high the margins are there -- I bet the ad margins are better!
Amazon's ad sales are kind of a double edged sword though since most of their ads are from product vendors. If vendors need to spend X% of their revenue on Amazon ads to make sales, the prices of products on Amazon will rise to compensate for that new expense.
Google knows what I search for... Amazon knows what I spend my money on. I'd say that might be a competitive advantage. Of course judging by the suggestions I get after getting a gift for someone else, maybe not.
Google knows what you buy on Amazon too. That's why Amazon had to start using emails like "Your order of [X] and 3 more items have shipped".
Previously, they'd list all ordered items in the email but because Google could grab that data via Gmail (for "relevant advertising purposes", of course), they changed their approach.
> Previously, they'd list all ordered items in the email but because Google could grab that data via Gmail (for "relevant advertising purposes", of course), they changed their approach.
So that's why they did that. I wish they had limited that change to gmail addresses. I host my own email, and I wish they hadn't made me usability collateral damage.
A lot of people use a legacy ISP or mac.com email addresses and just auto-forward to gmail, so a Gmail only filter wouldn't have worked comprehensively, so I guess they had to go scorched earth.
Doesn't Amazon already have mobile ads? Maybe this was just amazon-on-adsense but I remember often seeing Amazon items I've recently viewed show up in other apps.
I'm not sure why Amazon thinks mobile video ads are a good idea at a time their marketplace has taken a serious hit in reputation.
Most people are already wary of counterfeit goods on the marketplace. For many household goods, cheap offerings from fly-by-night operations clutter the search results. Review sections are chock-full of 5-star reviews reading "Great product!" or similarly generic messages. Many sellers have begun essentially paying their reviewers with free goods via the Vine program; and of course those 99.9% of those reviews are favorable.
What used to feel like a premium experience now feels closer to a dollar store experience full of questionable products. Video ads on top of that will probably decrease my engagement; time will tell whether I'll continue to use Amazon for goods not available in my locale.
I agree, and anecdotally, I buy all kinds of things frequently on Amazon - food, electronics, cosmetics, pricey PC parts, stationery, phone cases, etc. - with a purchase every week or two and have yet to encounter a counterfeit. And in the rare cases I do have problems (damaged product, shipment missing, etc), Amazon customer support has consistently been good. So personally speaking, their reputation in my eyes hasn't really changed. I suspect that many customers share my feelings, but like with every other service industry, the most outspoken customers are the unhappy ones.
I have gotten a few duds, but as you say: Their customer support is second to none and i know if it happens i'll be able to return the item at no cost for a full refund.
However I also am pretty careful about keeping an eye out for scams and counterfeit items as well, there are definitely some obvious ones out there and it does make me wary and purchase less then i would otherwise.
HN and Reddit often seem to have very different views and concerns from the general population. Not sure if it's because of the echo chamber effect (reinforcing each other confidence by agreeing), or self-selection (people who share those views are more likely to be engaged on these forums), or something else.
You hear the out-of-touch people the most, because [usually] only the people with negative opinion (tiny minority; otherwise the business would go bankrupt) that are vocal about things. Neutral people don't care, people with positive opinion are happy about the experience and keep it to themselves.
I don't think that comment is completely irrelevant. There are already issues of Amazon's own branded being pushed to top, then sponsored listings being pushed to to the top, on top of counterfeit stuff. Now there will be another thing to ignore. I rarely use Amazon because I don't have Prime but if I did, this will certainly annoy me because I am already paying Amazon for the subscription as well as when I buy things, let me get straight to the thing I want to and let it be what I want (read - not fake).
> This is the top comment of literally every Amazon thread. This has nothing to do with ads.
I disagree. The comment questions why Amazon would do this now, since they're already facing consumer trust issues, and chasing advertising dollars will likely erode consumer trust further.
Every open marketplace is always going to list counterfeit goods as a business risk, because it is. That's not the same thing as implying that their reputation is damaged. On the contrary, Amazon's horrible reputation for counterfeit goods seems to exist here and on reddit and that's pretty much it.
> Every open marketplace is always going to list counterfeit goods as a business risk, because it is.
On the contrary, Amazon did not list counterfeit goods as a business risk in its 10-K filings prior to 2019.[1] It has been an open marketplace since before 2019.
That does seem to imply they only started taking it seriously as a business risk somewhat recently, which could be interpreted as hedging against reputation damage.
Otherwise I'm in agreement that there's outsized discussion of the problem on reddit and HN.
To provide a correlary, I am sure Boeing didn't mention software and MACS as a risk until a month ago. Why would Amazon even acknowledge counterfeits to be an issue until it actually effects business?
What's the burden of proof for 'their reputation is damaged' here? A fully sponsored brand survey?
A number of companies from Lush Soaps to Birkenstock are suing Amazon for infringement, the AAFA is requesting the US Trade Representative office to add Amazon markets to their list of known counterfeiters, and Amazon is finally acknowledging to investors they have a problem - but if you're just going to dismiss this as "business as usual" then it's not worth the discussion.
The Lush lawsuit was from 2014 and had absolutely nothing to do with counterfeit items, it was about allowing advertisers to use the Lush keyword in search listings for ads.
Birkenstock is a good example of a case they will almost certainly lose. Courts have routinely ruled that marketplaces can't be held responsible for counterfeits that they don't control.
> the AAFA is requesting the US Trade Representative office to add Amazon markets to their list of known counterfeiters
That's a joke and should be treated as such. It's never going anywhere and is purely a PR campaign to get Amazon to more proactively work against counterfeit products. That's a fair goal, but hardly impacting Amazon's reputation among consumers.
> and Amazon is finally acknowledging to investors they have a problem
They've done so in their 10k in the past as well.
> but if you're just going to dismiss this as "business as usual" then it's not worth the discussion.
If the entirety of your evidence is silly requests and a mixture of lawsuits that either won't work (because they never have) or are entirely unrelated to the conversation, then yeah I'd say there's near-zero reputation damage.
That said, Project Zero indicates that Amazon is paying attention so they absolutely see some risk. But nothing you've presented suggests that Amazon's reputation as far as consumers are concerned has been impacted as of yet. Their annual sales growth seems to confirm that.
IIRC, Birkenstock has evidence Amazon used the counterfeiters to force them to bring all (even new/brick & mortar only) Birkenstocks to Amazon. "Yes, we can solve your counterfeit problem, if you stop having special editions outside of Amazon".
Which puts the "they can't control" part in doubt :)
First of all there's no "evidence" of anything, it's a claim Birkenstock is making. And the actual claim (by the CEO of Birkenstock) had nothing to do with counterfeiters, it was that Amazon was attempting to attract legitimate retailers that sell Birkenstocks to sell them on Amazon.
Then the Birkenstock CEO threatened to sue Amazon for doing so, saying that Amazon was knowingly violating their policy, despite the fact that you can't win lawsuit for a company that you have no legal agreement with, so that threat is empty BS.
Yup. This is my point. Granted, I'm mainly speaking from anecdotes myself here, but the only place I ever hear about how terrible Amazon is because of counterfeits is here or reddit (rarely reddit.)
I live in Seattle so I hear a lot of criticism of Amazon, but this isn't one that surfaces often.
It's a common phenomena that happens in any online forum once they reach a certain size, or the topic becomes sufficiently controversial.
As far as I can tell, it's basically "whataboutism", but even more indirect or abstract.
"Amazon might have an ads service, but what about this particular criticism of their online marketplace (of which I only see on this news aggregator)?"
"Oculus came out with this new hardware, but what about their ownership by Facebook?"
"HotelsTonight is being bought by Airbnb, but what about Airbnb's behavior with local governments and their housing policy?"
I see what you're getting at, but I don't think "whataboutism" is the right term for that. Whataboutism would be like Facebook being criticized and someone responding, "Yes but Apple does it too!"
What you're describing seems like it's an example of how everything eventually reverts to the mean. In this case, the "mean" point of discussion for any topic is the subtopic most people are familiar with and have a strong opinion about.
Controversial topics are much more engaging, which means threads about them attract more comments. In turn that surfaces more attention to them, from which it follows that on any given topic you're likely to see people slowly shift the discussion to the most familiar subtopic, which will generally be the most engaging (and thereby likely controversial) one.
It's a feedback cycle which sustains a meme (in the linguistic sense of the word). A majority zeitgeist is formed around an idea which is thoroughly self-propagating, because every time a topic with any degree of relevancy pops up, the discussion shifts to the meme.
Because they are one of the biggest companies in the world and ads help them and their partners sell more via official channels. It's a very simple formula.
Because Amazon spends a measurably significant amount of revenue on advertising. Recouping a fraction of that money is substantially more valuable than any hit to their reputation.
>"Many sellers have begun essentially paying their reviewers with free goods via the Vine program; and of course those 99.9% of those reviews are favorable."
I long suspected this. Can you say what is the Vine program and how does it work? I am familiar with this.
Not surprising, since ads now cover maybe 25% of the search results screen. Buying on Amazon is a nightmare now with 10 identical-looking Chinese brands to sift through, and a review system that frequently shows reviews for a completely different model of the product in question.
