Comment by aeturnum
20 hours ago
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 than "the highest ranked item in this category." Maybe another company has a feature that increases cost but adds utility, maybe there's a brand you trust more that makes a slightly less popular version, etc.
The problems of parasitic advertising still exist. People still see ads for products they will like less than the top rated search, but it's wrong to imagine that Amazon actually knows what that person would like best. If matching people to products was that easy you'd have all kinds of 3rd party recommendation services making very specific recommendations to make money off affiliate links. Instead we have a million "top 10" sites that work about as well as picking the #1 seller in an amazon category: not that well.
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 products that exists where that logic is true. There is so much variation in cost vs quality, or entire feature-sets like you pointed out.
This bleeds over into incredibly "messy" areas too, like societal signaling. Someone might specifically want a more expensive version of something simply because it's more expensive. The author doesn't seem to account for any of this complexity, even the "simple" complexity of cost/quality/features.
The value that these types of ads can add is that Amazon can build up models that can "learn" and get better at matching every unique persons criteria and provide a way for vendors to get "matched" with that buyer. Obviously you can still critique this model, but to assume it's strictly bad feels like it lacks nuance/critical thinking.
I think the article’s argument depends on Amazon having a great search engine that can surface the Pareto frontier of air friers, not just a single universal best. Then contaminating that great engine with ads that strictly make it worse.
But as you point out, there’s reason to think Amazon’s search engine is imperfect, especially for new products. Ads are the messy, side-effect-laden solution for that problem.
I don't think that nuance changes the big picture which is that Amazon has a conflict of interest between showing you the best product that you want, and showing you the product that the seller is most willing to pay to advertise. Quibbling over nuance just gives air cover to this fundamentally extractive rent seeking behavior. We really need stronger anti-trust action in the tech era given the extremely low friction and winner-takes-all dynamics of modern tech economy.
"Nuance isn't relevant here because I've already assumed what they're doing is strictly bad" is what I'm haering.
Engaging with the nuance means engaging with the fact that rent-seeking can only exist where value (real or perceived) actually exists. Amazon is only able to sell these ads because sellers get value out of them through increasing sales using the infrastructure that Amazon built. The fact that they capitalize on that by creating a market for those ad-buyers to compete in (rent-seeking, as you'd call it) is not remotely surprising, they should be able to profit using the systems they built up. This is akin to paying more to rent a "better" booth to sell at at a trading card convention; or for ads costing more during the Superbowl halftime than at 2am on local news. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with any of that.
As far as a conflict of interest, Amazon is still incentivized to get a potential customer to make a purchase, and (more importantly) to make sure that the customer would want to keep returning to Amazon for future purchases. If Amazon develops a reputation of giving suggestions for junk products that people end up buying, people will stop using Amazon. It's "naturally" regulated in that way. Gibing some governing body the power to regulate what companies are/aren't allowed to suggest to their customers feels like it's only relevant if this was a true monopoly.
Re: monopolies- Amazon is not hiding alternative products to those in the ads; customers are people with the autonomy to find the product that best suites their needs, and they still have full capability of doing that. There are also plenty of other ways to purchase products, I'd guess that 95%+ of products available on Amazon can be sold/purchased elsewhere, it's just that Amazon is the most convenient way (for both buyers and sellers).
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I think the idea is true if you reverse it: there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives.
This also lines up a lot better with other complaints with amazon: their inability to get rid of counterfeit sellers, the degree to which their reviews (and listings) are gamed, etc. Arguably the reason people buy garbage on Amazon has more to do with their lack of interest in policing misbehavior than ads (though perhaps the ads are the financial incentive to keep being lazy).
You can see this with the knockoff[1] plugin that flags "no-name" brands on amazon. Sometimes this takes out the listings you want and you need to consider it, but I think it's a pretty effective counter to the kinds of scammy ads this poster is frustrated with.
[1] https://knockoff.co/
> there are a lot of cheap air fryers that are not worth buying over a one or more "good value" alternatives
OK, but the customer is the only person who gets to decide what that means. "Reversing the idea" is just making the same (imo faulty) assumption that the author is, which is that there is some known "good value" product that everyone should be buying. What you perceive to be "good value" might be "overpaying for useless features" to someone else.
If anything, allowing for ads like Amazon does is probably more likely to match a customer to the product that's "good value" for them. If someone consistently buys products after sorting price low>high, then you know something about their purchasing habits - giving them a recommendation to buy a $450 air fryer because it's "good value" (decided by who?) isn't helpful when they really just want something barebones for $100.
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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.
I think this comment is mistaken. The blog post is simplistic and doesn't cover the case you're describing of multiple good products for different consumers, but it's ultimately still right. Ads are not a good solution for this use case either because they don't exist to actually match consumers to good products, they exist to selfishly drive sales to their brand owners. That goal is parasitic to the service of product recommendation. Similarly with Amazon itself, their goal is to maximize some combination of sales revenue and ad revenue.
The solution to this is just what you described, a 3rd-party recommendation service. I don't think there's any reason Amazon should be able to make better recommendations than I can with a minute or two of research. Advertising giants only have a marketing profile on people, I think it's fairly limited in terms of how helpful it can be.
The problem with the "top 10" sites you mention is ironically that they are almost all actually advertisement sites, not genuine product recommendation sites. This means they get paid to place products and are essentially corrupt. I would guess the ecosystem is so universally horrible is because SEO costs money and requires them to aggressively monetize to exist. I've read that the Wirecutter is one of the only genuine sites and I find that it usually works fairly well at the price bracket they choose and for certain kinds of home goods.
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