What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free but in practice companies are squeezing you for everything.
Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
111–120 of 289 posts
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me. Don't you have better use for your time? Normalizing the disaster that has become the internet (and absolving the key actors in that development) is robbing us all from experiencing a more sane online life.
Once google makes it possible, the next step will be a browser extension to synchronise with a crowdsourced list. These lists will of course be at risk of the same pressures as ad blockers, with incentives for list maintainers to accept bribes to remove entries. But over time, the quality of the lists will improve and so too will the quality of the UX for users of the aforementioned extensions. That is, assuming the…
This mostly already happened more than a decade ago. Google killed it. Search for 'Google personal blocklist':
https://searchengineland.com/googles-personal-blocklist-dele...
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#113Anecdotally, 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.
This is true and I don’t work for G but will say I use Google Shopping quite a bit for products especially outdoor gear and apparel (an area where Amazon sucks, at least they way I shop) and it’s a criminally underrated tool
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#114I 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.
The most satisfying experience for me at the moment is the suggestions I get on a new tab in chrome on Android. Not because the suggestions are amazingly good - sometimes they're ok - but because when they lead to some crap-infested site I can click to not see that site any more. That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me. I genuinely think the Google would benefit hugely by making this a possibility…
Kagi search lets you block, lower, raise, and pin results by domain.
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most satisfying experience for me at the moment is the suggestions I get on a new tab in chrome on Android. Not because the suggestions are amazingly good - sometimes they're ok - but because when they lead to some crap-infested site I can click to not see that site any more. That ability to cull keeps the suggestions workable for me. I genuinely think the Google would benefit hugely by making this a possibility…
They used to have that feature, but then you could block the spammiest sites that make them money, can’t have that. Luckily, I neither use Chrome nor Google.
Here's to churn among the Big Tech oligopoly. Cheers!
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#116What's interesting is that in this model a lot of companies might be paying for ads without ever seeing a return, because they cannot outbid those at the top. In that case, Amazon would be sponging up money from a lot of players and returning it to a few. Which would be ok, but the problem is that you can either play the game or drop out. So it becomes a little bit of a gig economy thing where in theory you're free b…
That's not how online ads work? You bid for ad space, but you pay only if you get clicks, and are booted out fast if you don't get any. If you're always outbid, or nobody clicks on your ads, your spend is zero.
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#117Anecdotally, 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…
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Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#118Amazon 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.
I think (hope?) it's the beginning of a long, slow decline for Amazon as a marketplace, unless they fix this. This distrustful sentiment is something I hear from a lot of younger people (<40 year olds). I didn't even notice it myself until recently, but I am buying more and more stuff directly from other niche e-commerce websites, because I know half of the search results on Amazon are a scam.
Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#119Re: Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
#120I never encountered ads on Amazon, so out of curiosity I disabled uBlock Origin and visited Amazon. It seems that the ads are for products sold on Amazon. Clicking an ad redirects you to the product page.
Until now I thought that sites where you go to spend money are free of ads. This is a new low. What's next, ads on banking apps? Ads on the revenue service website?
I think ads play the biggest part in why the Internet is so fill with junk today, to the point you have to sift through mountains of trash to find something genuinely useful.