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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is most like Facebook in that the ads are only displayed on its own property rather than all across the whole internet on any site that displays 3rd party ads. That, combined with the fact that Amazon also has a ton of data on its users just like Facebook makes them very alike (not that Google doesn't as well).

What separates Google from Amazon is that their paid ads can be displayed on any 3rd party site that they don't own, through DoubleClick. And of course the whole search engine monopoly makes that impenetrable for now.

Of course, it's all up for grabs, Amazon could go out and buy an ad network like Mediavine and go head-to-head with DoubleClick.

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We've been displaying Amazon CPM display ads on a site for over 2 years now. This is an ad network for affiliates, but paid by CPM. It's mostly a mix of large brand adverts and Amazon remarketing ads (normally for products you've looked at).

The service is about to be shutdown though at the end of this month, and their suggestion is that we apply to their larger header bidding network (Unified Ad Marketplace), but not sure we'll qualify for that.

Facebook has a display network similar to DoubleClick, called Audience Network. In my experience it pays publishers a lot better than DoubleClick. For advertisers, they're able to target on more demographic categories (for now, the CA scandal has done a lot to reduce targeting options).

Also people tend to forget that advertising on Google’s own properties represents the vast majority of its ad revenue.

A significant chunk of that ~4 Billion or ~5% of total global online advertising is because Google also owns YouTube, which captures a large chunk total advertising spending independent of search.

Which is almost all revenue that Google has to share with YT publishers. 50% anyway.

in my experience FB's audience network was junk

The first thing I look at when optimizing a Facebook ad campaign is to look at performance by placement.

In many cases, turning off the Audience Network will do wonders for your CPA.

Seconded - one of my default actions when setting up a campaign is to switch that off.

Compared to Google's Display Network using non-retargeting ads? IMO, comparing banner placements to native social is like comparing apples to oranges

GDN is generally bad, worse than FB

I've seen lots of money wasted on blogspam websites within GDN (non-retargeting) -- there's a need to be very hands on if you don't want to waste money across all display tactics, in my opinion

Twitter also has an ad product called "Twitter Display" in which your promoted tweets get reformatted into display ads and shown in other ad-supported mobile apps. It was some of the cheapest, but worst-performing, traffic we've ever driven through a paid channel.

FB, Instagram, and WhatsApp may as well be the whole internet for too many people.

Amazon is starting to roll out their ad network - we're currently getting ready to roll out an update to my $dayjob's app with Amazon ads in it.

More importantly, almost all of Amazons searches are commercial in nature, whereas I think for Google it is only about 30%, the other categories being navigational and educational. This means that their data is much more monetisable.

Amazon and Facebook already have integrations with third parties

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