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

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

#101

Post by lordnacho »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #66
echelon wrote: 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…

Outside of basic data like figuring out the cast of a movie, practically all of my searches now have "reddit" appended to them. Medical and health-related queries are particularly screwed. Every top result is practically the same gamified SEO trash with filler content. I also don't know who told Google to ignore the keywords in my search query and show me a cluttered page that targets "topics" instead of keywords.

The cool thing about Reddit is you might just be able to ask for a recommendation and someone will give it to you. Either someone else has asked before, or you find the right sub where the people with the answer are.

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

#102

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.

Amazon could improve their usability so much by providing proper metadata entry systems for sellers and enforce their proper usage by moderating their platform.

But that costs money, there are more than enough customers still buying stuff off of Amazon and the real cash cow is AWS anyway.

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

#103

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

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…

> Like yesterday Amazon kept showing lightbulbs with the wrong physical socket size.

This exact thing happened to me. One of the problems, was that the bulb I was looking at, had a specific mini-candelabra socket, and the ones they showed me, had one that was just slightly larger, but looked almost identical (and the name was also “mini candelabra”). This was one of those “recommendations,” in the list at the bottom.

I actually ordered the wrong bulbs, based on this, and had to return them.

I have also had Amazon direct me to gray market and counterfeit goods, with extreme confidence; often insisting that the dodgy product was being sold by the manufacturer.

I now order direct from the manufacturer, for anything over about $50, even if I pay more (happens less frequently, these days. Amazon is no longer the bargain it used to be, and even gray market now sells for full retail). Sometimes, the manufacturers use Amazon for fulfillment, but I don’t mind, as they direct me to the real product.

It’s not 100% Amazon’s fault, as the scammers have figured out how to game the system, but Amazon is not trying to fix it. I assume that this is because they make so much money.

I have heard, anecdotally, that selling on Amazon has become a nightmare, for legit sellers; especially small ones. The scammers have no problem, putting up with B.S., but real sellers can drown.

Here’s something I experienced, a couple of years ago, when I was looking for a stand for my phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25582762 (the links in that post no longer do what they did, back then).

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

#105

Post by mschuster91 »

Ayesh wrote: post #84
kenhwang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those Audible/SkillShare/VPN ads ruined YouTube for me, and I consume a lot less content on YouTube nowadays. Sponsor Block addon has saved me hours automatically skipping them, but I can't help but worry that it is only going to make things worse in the long term as creator revenue drops.

Yeah, most youtubers simply read off some prepared generic script... although there are a few exceptions like HeavyDSparks who at least make the effort to make a fun story tied in with the video's topic for whatever supplements they're shilling.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by Anon4Now »

mym1990 wrote: post #46
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?

If you use Chrome, then switch to another browser that allows full adblocker functionality. I use Firefox with UBlock Origin and hardly see any ads.

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

#108

Post by didntreadarticl »

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #97

Amazon is really shit now. You try to buy a product and instead of showing you the actual brands it just shows you alibaba scam products. I have to go to other sites and find the actual products and then search directly on amazon. It won’t be long before I just stop using amazon altogether.

What Shopping On Amazon Feels Like

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQpxAvjD_30

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

#109

Post by oefrha »

Somewhat tangential, the second graph shows not just Amazon, but every big tech’s advertising revenue growing like crazy year over year from 2016 to 2021, particularly Google and Facebook. Growth slowed a bit in 2020 (still grew nonetheless) but rebounded hard in 2021. Excuse the question from someone who don’t pay attention to the ad industry at all: WTF happened to the popular narrative at the time that companies were cutting ad spend during covid?

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

#110

Post by Macha »

oefrha wrote: post #109

Somewhat tangential, the second graph shows not just Amazon, but every big tech’s advertising revenue growing like crazy year over year from 2016 to 2021, particularly Google and Facebook. Growth slowed a bit in 2020 (still grew nonetheless) but rebounded hard in 2021. Excuse the question from someone who don’t pay attention to the ad industry at all: WTF happened to the popular narrative at the time that companies w…

It was very short lived as an overall trend and while some big physical venue based advertising (e.g. for Disneyland) did stay low for years, online and digital products (like say Disney+) more than made up for it
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