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Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

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31–40 of 289 posts

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#31
I went to Amazon without an ad blocker for the first time yesterday (wanted to try the fakespot service, but it requires an extension and "access all" so I created a clean profile for it). I was surprised how many ads there were on Amazon, I thought the situation was already bad with an ad blocker, considering they show a lot of hard-coded ads, but wow.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#33
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should be nervous about all of its ads system because their search engine is becoming increasingly trash

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3…

I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output.

In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but not some future edition of ChatGPT.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#34
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3…

I've heard much fuss about 4), but i'm still skeptical. Google makes most their money on commercial searches such as "what is the best TV", or "where to buy football tickets", not "please do my homework". And AI will have a hard time returning superior results on the former, because many people are looking for human reviews rather than an AI output. In this sense, Amazon ads will continue to a threaten Google, but no…

> human reviews rather than an AI output

AI will very soon be perfectly capable of generating human sounding reviews. It just needs to "dumb down" the tone a bit to be believable.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#35
post #26
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3…

> You find information on TikTok Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?

YouTube's monetization and algorithms incentivized content to be bloated with fluff like long intros, outros, intermissions, shoutouts, life updates, sponsorships, etc. Basically content that added no value to the user and only exists to make the video long enough to qualify for more ad pods. A 10 minute video would often only have 2 minutes of relevant content.

TikTok encourages the opposite: so content creators cram in as much information as possible, often speeding up music and talking. Sometimes with supercuts to even minimize the natural pauses between words. The same 2 minutes of content gets sped up and cut down to 30s and shares more similarities with a lightning talk and slide deck than a video.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#36
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should be nervous about all of its ads system because their search engine is becoming increasingly trash

1) It's no longer the search intent destination for advertisers. You find information on TikTok, you research products on Reddit, you send your purchase intent to Amazon, etc. These platforms will accrete more advertiser dollars. 2) Google SERPs sucks now. Low quality ads at top, low quality results that follow. A lot of SEO bullshit. Information returned is often irrelevant. Users know this and are getting fed up. 3…

I disagree with the implicit assumption that llms can’t be gamed. There’s simply too much money to be made for that to remain true.

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#38
post #29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You find information on TikTok Am I old? What kind of information. Not to be on Googles side here but, for information in video form... YouTube is at least somewhat reasonable still. Right?

TikTok is a holy grail of distilled information. In two short years of TikTok recipes, my wife has learned how to cook better than almost any restaurant we eat at, and we're serious foodies. Zero to one hundred, just from TikTok. There's everything from OSint TikTok to finance TikTok to archeologist TikTok... It's crazy, and it's good. Once you find your niche, the information density approaches that of a black hole.…

Is it information or inspiration, a la Pinterest? I get some cooking youtubers can be long winded like cooking blogs of before, but I feel like you find people you like, and can way easier scrub the video to important parts on YT.

And I get us on HN are a particular cohort, but is there really as much depth of information? Literally had to help a family member fix their jeep over the holidays and "replace fuel pump jeep Cherokee 1998" is just not something I think Tiktok would be good at. Idk I should try and install it sometime i guess.

And then also, at least i've noticed on Instagram (and occasionally FB), that like sometimes I see something. Forget about it, click elsewhere, and then cant go back to find it again? Vs /feed/history and even browser history on Youtube?

Edit: Is this normal? I cant even search for videos on tiktok.com without an account?

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#39
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search. Ironically Amazon has been so aggressive with the ads recently I've lost all trust in searching on Amazon itself. I'm back to using Google to find the Amazon product page. On Amazon I search for a specific brand and model and it's on page 4, buried unti…

Strongly agree. Dropped prime after I Amazon adds mean I couldn't find what I wanted. Now use google to find specific stuff on D2C websites (probably Shopify) and spend less. It's great!

I dropped prime after "two-day shipping on all orders" had degenerated into "we'll deliver it when we feel like it, and you can't get two-day shipping even if you're willing to pay extra for it".

Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business

#40

So the companies that sell on Amazon pay money to Amazon (from the revenues they get from Amazon's customers) to have their products listed more favorably than competitors (one of which is actually Amazon). I can see how this seems advantageous and monopolistic for Amazon...

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/requirements-getting-product... "You may be required to pay a slotting fee to, in effect, purchase shelf space if there is a great deal of competition fighting for the same space." no difference than paying for shelf space.

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