Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ankit219 | Hacker News Reader

> the ‘retail media’ gold rush: the realisation that a high-traffic website or app could be ad inventory even if you’re not a media company, that you have very relevant ‘consented’ first party data (at the very least intent if not broader profiles) and probably purchase attribution too, that all of this now has more relative value given the push against cookies and third party data everywhere else - and that advertising margins are a lot higher than retail margins.

I think it's not visitors, but repeat users which makes it possible and so valuable. This is going to be the next phase of Adtech. Uber has a $500M run rate from ads, Walmart has $2.7B (from the same article), and evidently more and more companies will discover, if you can aggregate traffic to some decent level, you can monetize it with first party data. This advantage is only going to increase once we see Android launch their own version of tracking consent, and Chrome gets rid of cookies. A good horizontal play here is to sell targeting, attribution, and profiling services to all these "aggregators of traffic".

Not sure about the revenues per se, but I think Doordash, Expedia, Robinhood, Airbnb could also potentially generate ad revenue at low cost just based how much traffic (and repeat users) they get

But it will come at least somewhat at the expense of their core business, surely? An Airbnb with ads looks a lot less trustworthy than one without, I think.

I already don't trust airbnb because of their random fees they keep applying after actually putting in my information. And their general unreliability when it comes to supporting hosts and costumers.

One tip you may appreciate is to use the Australian version of airbnb (.au), their regulators require them to show the true cost of the rental, including all fees in the headline price.

It operates exactly the same as your regional airbnb once you switch the location and currency. For example, switching to USD and searching for apartments in California

That's an incredibly useful tip. Recommend you post it as an article in its own right.

Depends on how relevant are the ads. I think it augments the business because now businesses are monetizing majority of visitors in some way. It's sustainable for long term if the ads are relevant enough for users to not drop off. Ads and trust are inversely correlated agreed, though looking at Uber and Amazon, I am not sure if that is true for every case. I might be an outlier, but amazon ads after I search for a product are actually quite useful. And probably why advertisers get a good ROI (evident in growth) and users aren't turned off by it (evident in sales revenue). Relevance score for any ad would matter for the company.

Booking.com - the biggest travel website in the world, already does this and has been for years. They mainly charge via greater conversion fees (ie a bigger slice of the booking), as opposed to a cost per click model (which I think is Amazon’s preferred model). This way, they have a huge incentive on making the ad as relevant as possible, otherwise they’ve wasted inventory through not monetizing the click at all (whereas cost per click means you make money regardless of wether the user clicks through).

I meant wether the user converts, no clicks through.

For Expedia, it used to be the case that they made more from someone booking via an ad on the site than they did via direct purchases. Same model as Amazon Ads, really.

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