This is why we must kill ads. Ads fund evil - be it Google, Amazon, you name it.
The Amazon tax
641–650 of 731 posts
Re: The Amazon tax
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The term for this that I heard is: > Advertising as inference not influence. People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale". You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as mu…
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Re: The Amazon tax
#643> 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 case is even worse than the restaurant parable, because in that one the customer is already pretty much guaranteed and the coupon will give them enhance satisfaction that makes them more likely to come back. In Godin’s case, the customer doesn’t get that $1 and may not even buy the book, they may e.g. just be looking for the page to read reviews or link it to someone else.
Re: The Amazon tax
#644This is a lot of words to describe rent seeking. Google, Amazon, Instagram/Meta, ultimately all of these are earning their outsized margins through market-dominance enabled intermediation of commerce. I search for 'foo' and the top result is either Foo paying through the nose for what should really should be organic traffic or Bar 'buying' the click instead. In the absence of anti-trust the only winning move is to bu…
Now show Seth’s audience (which has been accumulated for a long time) your explanation and theirs. I’d wager most people would be scratching their heads and rereading yours, while they’d breeze through Seth’s. In other words, your take may be shorter, but it’s not clearer or necessarily faster to read when aiming for comprehension. Seth doesn’t write for people who visit HN everyday.
Re: The Amazon tax
#645>If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. 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). What if I made a new air fryer that hasn't received a lot of reviews and costs a little more because of…
> How would I break through, if not ads? Make YouTube videos. Food porn is a thing, and some subset of that crowd will want to watch you fry stuff with your "pro" fryer.
So, your alternative to ads is… Ads? If you’re making a YouTube channel to promote your product, that’s still an ad. It’s just taking you longer (and probably more money) to get it out.
Re: The Amazon tax
#646I've slowly shifted all my consumer purchases from Amazon to local shops and other online platforms, including Etsy. I'm now seriously contemplating deleting my Amazon account of 15 years in one whole swoop. The quality degradation is painfully apparent, and the value add of Amazon in my life has been steadily declining for a while. I've also had terrible experiences with AWS, but that's a different story. Amazon's o…
> Amazon's only core product that they care about now is their stock price.
wrt to article insight, Benedicts Evans has been mentioning Ads being the major profit driver at Amazon in his newsletter since 2-3 years ago.
Re: The Amazon tax
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't surprise me that corporations [whose primary, if not sole concern is the profit motive] don't care about the morality of their customers. What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet, something that's been a popular retort against progressive and humanitarian movements for at least the past two decades.
> What I don't understand is why you're objecting to me voting with my wallet I did nothing of the sort. I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote. The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
> I simply said that I disagree with your stated motivations for your vote.
That's a semantic distinction without a difference.
> The way that you discuss your plan makes it sound as if you consider it morally incumbent upon others to follow suit. I do object to that.
That's more or less true: I do believe that people should BDS corporations that knowingly and willingly harm humanity (eg: aid and abet genocide); that it's not within our interests to let such things slide. And while I am biased, this doesn't feel like a particularly controversial take: it feels like I'm just spelling out basic civics. But.. this is also just like my opinion, man. You do you.
Re: The Amazon tax
#648This also happens in physical stores. In Walmart and others, good quality and good price items are at hard to find, let alone notice places. That happens because lower quality more expensive products pay Walmart for better placement.
Re: The Amazon tax
#649I 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.
Ha truth. Was looking for Uber app today. The first result was Flixbus. To be fair it is stated as "sponsored" in tiny letters.
Re: The Amazon tax
#650> Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.
I am always surprised that people apparently think corporations want the best for their customers. They want the best for their shareholders. Sometimes the latter overlaps with the former, but mostly that's not the case.