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The Amazon tax

seths.blog

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Re: The Amazon tax

#611

Post by 14 »

ndiddy wrote: post #242
amluto wrote: post #208

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“ I think it would be interesting to see legal action here. I’m not a lawyer, but I feel like there should be at least three ways to go after this: 1. Trademark infringement. If Amazon is using someone’s search that is clearly searching for a specific product, possibly trademarked, it seems inappropriate for them to serve up an…

It reminds me of an analogy I read a while ago in an article critiquing keyword based online advertising (can't find the article unfortunately). A restaurant wants to drum up new business, so the owner tasks three employees with handing out flyers with coupons attached. The coupons are marked to identify which employee passed them out, and each week the owner gives a bonus to the employee whose coupons get redeemed t…

This reminds me of my dad's story about decades ago as a kid paperboy they had a contest get people to sign up and who ever had the most after a few months would win a bike. He smoked everyone. They were desperate to know how he got so many people to sign up but he refused to tell them.

His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.

Re: The Amazon tax

#613

Post by inigyou »

falcor84 wrote: post #122
bko wrote: post #71

> The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. "The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product, the best would be a stale product that accumulated decades of reviews. Maybe it's still the best , maybe not. Bu…

>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement? Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rate…

This is a weird hack to avoid the obvious concept of "telling people your product exists".

You're also just one step away from suggesting it should be put higher up in the search results - which is the entire complaint!

Re: The Amazon tax

#614

Post by inigyou »

dools wrote: post #578

Don’t supermarkets allow companies to pay for shelf position? They also allow companies to do paid promotional sales activations renting floor space. It doesn’t seem all that egregious to me.

They do, and it's egregious.

Why doesn't the supermarket just raise the price on its own? If it thinks X brand sugar can be sold for $4.50 and the supermarket should pocket $1.50 of that, why not just do that instead of doing all the weird accounting tricks?

Re: The Amazon tax

#615

Post by inigyou »

Retric wrote: post #571
inigyou wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they know that. Cycling enshittification on and off seems to make more money overall than not enshittifying, even though it can make less during the downcycle.

Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins. There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.

What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.

Re: The Amazon tax

#616

Post by aidenn0 »

its_ethan wrote: post #253
aeturnum wrote: post #198

Amazon is a net-negative overall but I don't think this understanding is correct: > The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. This is only true in extremely simply scenarios. In reality, most of the time individual consumers may prefer something other…

You raise a very good counter to what feels like the main thrust of the guys article. It put to words something that felt "off" to me while reading it, that there was an assumption made that was never stated and was also incorrect - so thanks for putting that to words. He seems to assume that there is 1 air fryer that everyone on Earth should be getting, and all others are strictly inferior. There are probably no pro…

There is probably an air fryer that would be a good choice for the majority of people, and probably also the best choice for a large minority. This is probably true for a large number of popular products.

Re: The Amazon tax

#617

Post by spyckie2 »

Respectfully, this is nonsense. The consumer experience I have is that Amazon sells products at lower prices with better quality, support, variety and transparency than pretty much every other store out there.

Sponsored products do not dampen my consumer experience of Amazon. Paying 2$ more for the exact same good at Target or some other online store does dampen my experience.

If I as a consumer am paying a tax for sponsored products, then when I go to Target why isn’t the price cheaper? Let me give you a hint: you wouldn’t even get a shelf at target. Let’s stop pretending that Amazon is the only evil storefront that market manipulates for profit at the expense of consumers. Which store doesn’t? Which marketplace doesn’t?

Amazon gives you the option to sort and their sorts are actually useful. Ever use sort by best rating? It actually shows the best rated products. Sort by lowest price and prime? You can find good stuff down there.

Call a spade a spade, Amazon delivers on its price, availability and service. Just because the market is crowded and you need to spend money to get your stuff in front of people doesn’t mean you can make up ideological drivel.

Probably the most egregious human written article I’ve read in the ai era.

Re: The Amazon tax

#618

Post by Retric »

inigyou wrote: post #615
Retric wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burning reputation looks great on quarterly reports until the death spiral begins. There’s a great number of products that I used to like that have been replaced and that’s fine as a consumer but stock holders are generally better off when the stock is still valuable in 10 years vs a slightly higher dividend today.

What spiral? You just start another brand, producing extremely similar but unenshittified products. When that one takes over the market, you enshittify that one too. It doesn't matter that one brand died, because you keep making more. That's the cycle.

It’s hard for a large company to survive on something with a vastly smaller market share. You can make a living buying a portfolio from other people making it slightly worse over time and repeat, but the pipeline gets expensive and the market is fickle.

Instead the model that actually works is to buy companies, load up on debt, pay yourself from that, and then let the zombie crash and burn. Part of that process is goosing quarterly returns with deferred maintenance etc but the model depends on a sucker lending money rather than the market.

Re: The Amazon tax

#619

Post by qwertytyyuu »

tapland wrote: post #603
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #590

I see the exact same thing on Play Store, and I think Google is outright complicit in fraud. The top result when you search for an app, even if by exact name, is always, literally 100% of the time, not the app you are looking for, but some other ad-infested knockoff spyware shit whose developer paid Google to be placed before the real thing.

I saw a google authenticator copy (using the old icon but named Authenticator) about two weeks ago. It was the top result but an ad and not by Google. Sad I didn't screenshot it, couldn't find it when searching Google Authenticator again.

It annoys me so much that every authenticator is just called authenicator these, days. like its google authenicator, or microsoft authenicator, not just authenticator

Re: The Amazon tax

#620

Post by wat10000 »

joquarky wrote: post #565
wat10000 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrible behavior and it should be condemned, but I see no reason it should be illegal. There’s no deception in any of this. It’s like going to a store and asking an employee where the Widgets are, and they show you the Doodads instead because they’re more profitable. This is scummy but by no means illegal. The Doodads are labeled as Doodads. The advertisers know where their ads can be shown and under what co…

Is this argument applicable to nuisance laws?

What nuisance laws are you referring to and how would this argument potentially apply?
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