Amazon to Launch Mobile Ads, in a Threat to Google and Facebook

Having run CPC campaigns many times, companies do care about conversion rates. However, you are tracked across multiple sites and days. But companies do want to know who converted after seeing the ad and who converted after clicking the ad.

So, you're right they might not care that you convert immediately. But they do care that people convert over time or they'll pull the ad.

In a perfect market, the consumer and seller know everything about each other and every other product and service that they could conceivably ever want.

Since we live with imperfect markets, consumers do not have all the information about everything on the market. Sellers will pay money to communicate to consumers about their brand, product, service, etc. A percentage of consumers will be aware of this seller the next time they research or consider making a purchase decision.

The perfect ad is only shown the consumers that it is relevant to. Search/display ads are still not perfect, but they're closer to this than previous mediums of communication.

That's the thing - you're not an Amazon customer if you don't subscribe to Prime. You're the merchant's customer, you just happen to be shopping through Amazon's site.

My last two orders (over a year ago at this point) took 9 and 11 days to get to me. These were two-day ground shipments, and the products were in stock and fulfilled by Amazon. They simply let them sit for a week, and then shipped the slowest method possible.

This is obviously a ploy for me to sign up for Prime. I'll simply shop elsewhere. Amazon's prices are basically retail at this point, anyways. They used to have lots of deals, but I rarely see that on items I shop for these days.

edit: Bah to a certain extent you're right, plenty of tech is before its time and me saying being at the right place at the right time is a hind-sight 20-20 sort of comment. What I'm trying to say is I think lots of people have the same vision. Some people have it too early, some have it too late, and some have it at the time where the stars align: customers get it, VC gets it, and your company gets and and has the ability to execute on it.

long story short I hope we can agree that while the ability to execute is a requirement it simply isn't enough.

I'd say any change you'd make is like farting in the wind at this point.

Of course, that's entirely your call to make.

There are other data mining processes I personally find much more nefarious.

I'm actually ok with facebook/ig/google adwords ads. I'm not ok with intrusive, redirecting, in your face, ads. I could be alone in this opinion.

If I go to the Economists' website, I will see ads for:

- a university website I went to that dropped a remarketing cookie into my browser

- the shitty dating app full of bots and escorts, that would never have passed a QC review at a publication. Yet they are common on FB and TW (maybe Google Ads is different).

- the tshirt website that displays some machine-generated text based on what it thinks my interests are.

These are what I consider intrusive ads. When I see one, I don't want to have to think about what trail I left that led to these particular ads being shown to me.

I used to regularly read "Astronomy" and "Sky & Telescope", for example, and would have been disappointed if the ads went away. Ads in those magazines were the primary way most amateur astronomers back in, say, the '70s would find good equipment.

Other magazines I would have been disappointed to lose ads from were "Popular Electronics", "Chess Life" and "Byte".

For more general interest magazines, like "Time" or "Newsweek", I don't recall looking forward to the ads like I did for the above mentioned magazines, so wouldn't have minded if they went away. On the other hand, print ads generally weren't intrusive, though, so if they would have had to raise the price of the magazine to get rid of them I would rather keep them.

Although newspapers were general interest, their ads were often useful because they were usually for local things. Remember, back in the day we bought almost everything in person at local stores, so these ads often alerted us to sales and deals that we were interested in.

Do you have any better models for providing expensive-to-run services to everybody, and not just the select few who are willing/able to pony up the cash directly?

Every single wall-of-text criticism of ad based monetization on HN contributes nothing new, is full of thinly-stretched analogies (like your "cigarette smoke"), and rarely suggests an alternative, and even more rare a workable one.

The thing that bothers me isn't so much ads themselves, but the implicit meaning behind them: consumption. It's simply not a sustainable business or ecological model.

> Don't those mega billboards annoy you?

No. They don't impact my life whatsoever.

> Don't the auto playing audio/video ads annoy you?

The auto-playing ones like what you get on a news page, yes. The ones that play before a video on YouTube, no.

> You get on the subway, there are ads (and you've paid for the ticket, it is not even you are traveling free).

Don't even notice them most of the time. Sometimes they're mildly funny. Can't remember ever being bothered by one.

> You switch on the TV, there are ads.

I don't really watch TV (I guess that's a pretentious response), but when I do I just ignore the ads I'm not interested in. They don't annoy me.

> You open a bank account, the bank sells your address and the very next week you get junk in the mail.

Are you sure it's the bank doing this, and not the post office? In any case it's moving the goal posts a bit, because this is not advertising per se. It's data collection in service to advertising. I find it annoying, but not because I get junk mail. I don't find junk mail annoying, I throw it out without reading it. In fact I don't really read any physical mail.

> How is it self-righteous to expect a quiet, clutter free life/atmosphere?

Yeah but that's not the claim, is it? The person is saying it's self-righteous to constantly complain about advertising because it feels like a soapbox. In point of fact, I consider my life to be plenty quiet and clutter-free and I live in the same advertising-filled world you do.

There are legitimate reasons to dislike advertising. Sometimes ads are a vector for spreading malware, and the peripheral incentive structures are arguably unethical (particularly concerning the use and collection of consumer data). But quite a lot of complaining about advertising doesn't treat the subject with that level of intellectual engagement or nuance. Instead it's just impassioned yelling into a void about how unfair advertising is, or how unaesthetic the world is because of it.

I can see how that would become grating after a while, because on sites like HN and reddit you don't find nearly as many people e.g. crusading against climate change, disease, destitute poverty or hunger. It's actually a downvotable offense for someone to say, "Hey, I'm actually pretty okay with ads though!"

This is why the person you're responding to reacted that way. It's hard to take seriously the idea that the world is "disgusting" because of billboards. That's kind of a hyperbolic way of saying the world isn't the way you want it to be, isn't it?

Sure there are definitely places that have too much, and the overall implementation and UX of ads online is poor, but advertising itself has enabled a lot of people to have access to many things they otherwise would never have.

Then I spent a long weekend in São Paulo (Brazil), a mega-city which had banned all outdoor advertising a couple of years prior.

It was... a profoundly boring urban environment. Until then, I'd never imagined just how much advertising adds color, faces, humanity, and dynamism to a city.

I dunno. I still feel like I dislike ads in principle... but then in practice the world feels empty without them. Think of when you open a magazine from 80 years ago, the ads can be the most interesting part. They're part of our cultural fabric.

I still don't what to think, but I know it's more complicated than "ads are bad".

What you're describing seems like it's an example of how everything eventually reverts to the mean. In this case, the "mean" point of discussion for any topic is the subtopic most people are familiar with and have a strong opinion about.

Controversial topics are much more engaging, which means threads about them attract more comments. In turn that surfaces more attention to them, from which it follows that on any given topic you're likely to see people slowly shift the discussion to the most familiar subtopic, which will generally be the most engaging (and thereby likely controversial) one.

It's a feedback cycle which sustains a meme (in the linguistic sense of the word). A majority zeitgeist is formed around an idea which is thoroughly self-propagating, because every time a topic with any degree of relevancy pops up, the discussion shifts to the meme.

Horse's mouth. The horse is a mount.

However I also am pretty careful about keeping an eye out for scams and counterfeit items as well, there are definitely some obvious ones out there and it does make me wary and purchase less then i would otherwise.