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

ben-evans.com

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

#41

Post by w-ll »

kenhwang wrote: post #35
w-ll wrote: 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?

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 cra…

TikTok encourages fast consumable content (fast fashion), not information. And yes there could be fluff in longer form videos? But that also can included context, and allow the viewer to skip or watch at their own pace.

You could listen to an audio book at 10x speed, but would you retain much of it?

I guess i would say, TikTok information is the personification of the meme of "How to Draw an Owl" quick and short. But does it convey enough information, could a longer form be better?

https://i.imgur.com/H7U6Bn2.jpg

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

#42

Post by oblio »

Zetice wrote: post #37
jesuspiece wrote: post #2

This is egregious imo. Amazon needs to be broken up

What? Why? Volume of revenue is not a reason to break up a company.

Conflict of interest. Making a platform and using it yourself naturally corrupts you, the incentives are too strong.

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

#44

Post by freejazz »

montagg wrote: post #11
jesuspiece wrote: post #2

This is egregious imo. Amazon needs to be broken up

Walmart too. And Target. And grocery stores. I am not sure people are really prepared to take the implication of how unfair Amazon seems to its logical conclusion, because it means undermining a lot of what makes us comfortable in modern life under capitalism. Regulation targeted at increasing competition (breakups, rather than regulation Amazon as a monopoly of a kind and entrenching them) might result in a better o…

Isn't that inevitably the result if you want the cheapest thing? I pay a little more and I never shop at amazon.

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

#45

Post by dazc »

prawn wrote: post #14

I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website. I assume that there's either an internal push to become more like Amazon, or consultants pitch this approach to them and it's hard to resist. I wonder what the numbers are for supermarkets and the way they prioritise shelf placements? A friend had a big contract recently going around and hi-r…

'I've noticed Bunnings (like Home Depot, but in Australia) adding "Marketplace" listings for non-store things to their website...'

This is certainly a trend led, I am guessing, by troves of internal search data that suggests people are searching for things they don't have the capacity to stock themselves.

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

#46

Post by mym1990 »

Semaphor wrote: post #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.

I am generally getting overwhelmed with ads coming from every nook and cranny of life to the point that I don't even want to buy stuff anymore, for a lot of it its like: whats the point?

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

#47

Post by bboygravity »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #30

Original HN title used the information in the second line from the blog post, something like: "In 2021 Amazon ad revenue [was] more than the entire global newspaper industry." Hence some of the comments focus on newspaper business.

That's a weird comparison. IMO most newspapers fall under "ads" as well.

Political ads.

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

#48

Post by heisenbit »

KVFinn wrote: post #12
irjustin wrote: post #8

Anecdotally, I was connected to a number of people on the Ads team and years ago, the upper ups in the G machine were already extremely nervous of Amazon's internal ads system. Google has been regularly losing marketshare to Amazon because people perform searches for products directly there when previously it was done through google-search.

>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…

I have the impression that the spam is crowding out the long tail of products and is also driving away some better products with a unique selling point.

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

#49

Post by Zetice »

freejazz wrote: post #43
Zetice wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why? Volume of revenue is not a reason to break up a company.

It could be if it makes up the entire market...

Except it doesn't, not even remotely; there are dozens of other ways of buying things online, people just choose not to.

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

#50

Post by Zetice »

oblio wrote: post #42
Zetice wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Why? Volume of revenue is not a reason to break up a company.

Conflict of interest. Making a platform and using it yourself naturally corrupts you, the incentives are too strong.

What interest is conflicting, exactly? Seems like interests would be pretty perfectly aligned to maximize revenue.
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