This skit represents the experience quite well: https://youtu.be/nQpxAvjD_30?t=4s
I was thinking the same!
Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
321–330 of 510 posts
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but can you share some source for that? Like, on first page I've found in Google ( https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/amazon-revenue/ ) it says: AWS – ~17B Ads – ~9B Online stores – ~66B I actually wouldn't be surprised if I'm misunderstanding something and you're right, but can I ask where you got these numbers? Edit: On second read I realized the source I sent was misleading – the title talks about…
Yea no I'm also left scratching my head. I've never heard of a methodology to attribute market cap portions to business units; eager to hear some clarification too.
This is done all the time when pieces of businesses are bought and sold. It gets a little complex when the businesses are related (like Amazon Advertising and e-commerce, as opposed to Amazon e-commerce and AWS which are more fully independent of each other).
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#323My process for getting usable results on Amazon (.co.uk, presumably the others too): 1. Search for thing 2. Filter by department (necessary for 3) 3. Filter by Seller: only Amazon 4: Filter by reviews: 4 stars+ 5: Sort by price, Low > High 6: (Further filters as appropriate) 7: Look at only products with a high number of reviews 8: For every product, "See all reviews" and filter on "Verified purchase only" and "Show…
I applaud anyone who leaves a non 5 star review, gets contacted by the company with bribes to make it 5 stars, and updates their review to report the company doing that.
I've left negative reviews and they tend to get removed.
I was once even warned by Amazon that my account could be deactivated for violation of the ToS after posting a review that pointed out all of the other fake reviews on a particular product. Apparently the ToS allow fake reviews and disallow shining a light on it.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#324I have uBlock and fakespoter installed on my browser. I had to open another browser where I wasn’t logged in and had no extensions to reproduce the results.
I don’t know if the filtered results are that much better. But it is free from blatant ads.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, but can you share some source for that? Like, on first page I've found in Google ( https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/amazon-revenue/ ) it says: AWS – ~17B Ads – ~9B Online stores – ~66B I actually wouldn't be surprised if I'm misunderstanding something and you're right, but can I ask where you got these numbers? Edit: On second read I realized the source I sent was misleading – the title talks about…
Yea no I'm also left scratching my head. I've never heard of a methodology to attribute market cap portions to business units; eager to hear some clarification too.
When Amazon had a market cap of $1.7T, $1T of that was from AWS. I don't remember what the source was for the estimate.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not bagging on Chinese manufacturing in general, they build the worlds stuff, including super high quality+value items. Yet throwaway brands peddling junk that wouldn't have realistically made it onto the shelves of a big box store is a real problem on Amazon's marketplace, and other similar ones.
> I don't want garbage products that were sourced from the dumpster next to a Chinese factory after they make a defective batch. > Yet throwaway brands peddling junk that wouldn't have realistically made it onto the shelves of a big box store is a real problem on Amazon's marketplace, and other similar ones. Either it's a defective batch of products that would have been sold under a brand name or its junk that would…
> I'd also argue that being sold at a big box store is not really indicative of much in the 21st century.
If you haven't already, I'd recommend spending some time reading about what it takes to get a product on the shelf at Wal-Mart/Target/Costco. When a companies reputation relies on what it is selling, the bar becomes a lot higher.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#327Amazon is the third largest advertising company after Google and Meta. Its ad revenue is $32B (and growing fast, the run rate is $40B). That is half the revenue of AWS, which is worth 70% of Amazon's market cap. The inescapable conclusion is that Amazon's advertising is worth the remaining 30% of Amazon's market cap and Amazon's e-commerce arm is deemed worthless by Wall Street , its only purpose being to support the…
> The other inescapable conclusion is that whenever the quality of the shopping experience on Amazon and the needs of Amazon's advertising business clash, advertising will win (just as it has on Google). Saying that the e-commerce arm is worthless isn't really the right way to think about it - the ads business only exists to due the e-commerce product. Both Amazon and Google are well aware that their ad revenues depe…
Obviously Amazon's e-commerce division is not worthless, but it often happens that conglomerates are worth less than the sum of their parts. Many activist investors have been calling to split AWS from Amazon.com, but the ad business can't be split from the store that brings it eyeballs.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#328After starting up at Amazon ( biased opinion), it really is impressive to see the relentless customer focus. Even at the cost of short term profit or wall street gains, they have historical proof of putting the customer first.
Lots of Amazon ads? Sure. But they're generally useful, and the teams building the "not as profitable e-commerce" will be making something people love.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#329Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers. Free and fast shipping is no longer exclusive to them, and there are others out there with far nicer websites and no shitty ad listings.
I only need to buy something online every couple months, maybe once a month at most. I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I will spend 1 more second thinking about the process than I have to. Amazon always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me. I've never had any issues with fakes that HN complains about all the time.…
>" I hate shopping so I'll be damned if I will spend 1 more second thinking about the process than I have to. Amazon always has the thing, ships it in 2 days, I can be relatively sure I'm not getting ripped off by more than +/- 25% and that's good enough for me."
My experience before I got rid of Amazon years ago started out similar but then I found that the process of shopping took longer and longer - trying to compare 50+ versions of the same thing, filtering out dubious looking sellers and brands etc. I actually started to feel like the experience was worse than just going to a store and carrying the the thing home. I also started to think the prices weren't really all that great because they became the same or or often slightly more expensive that what I could find in a brick and mortar store. Couple this with a general decline in Amazon's last mile delivery which seemed to be a whole other shit show where the contracting parcel service would mark them as delivered even though they hadn't actually been deliver yet and it just became a really miserable experience. Should you need to contact customer service and speak to someone you can pretty much dispense with another half hour of your time.
>"But for the vast majority of folks consistency is king."
For me there was very little consistency in the Amazon experience. It was hit and miss. From reading this article though it sounds like the thing that is consistent is an increasingly worse experience.
Re: Almost everything on Amazon is becoming an ad
#330It’s refreshing to see this in the Washington Post, owned by Bezos. Tiny beacon of hope going out into the darkness. Search ads on shopping websites are just capitalism taken to the natural end. Hopefully degradation of user experience will curb it somewhat. Our only other option is some sort of new Internet Bill of Rights being passed and I’m not optimistic lobbyists would ever allow it. We need some sort of fund fo…
> We need voters that vote for candidates that would support the human right to freedom from manipulation from corporations.
Donate $3 to the Presidential Election Fund every year on your US taxes. It costs you nothing, is a single checkbox, and redirects $3 of your taxes into the fund.
Candidates that take money from the fund have additional (mostly good) limits placed on their spending.
It's not perfect, but it's free to do and creates an alternative to lobbyist funding.
https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-election-campaign-fun...