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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

"These have since become common building blocks of Internet-based computing systems, supporting companies ranging from large enterprises like Infor US Inc. and Netflix Inc. to startups such as Instacart Inc."

When I see a brand name mentioned randomly in an arricle, I wonder who paid for it. Why would Bloomberg mention instacart specifically? Is it common practice for companies to pay for these subtle pseudo-mentions in articles?

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Not paid directly - it's a combination of 1) brands being top of mind 2) what people / robots will recognize and ever so likely potentially to share or what will have the tiniest bit of extra SEO juice.

#1 only comes from a lot of ongoing PR outreach, coffee chats, briefings, etc - which takes time and $$$$ usually via an agency working nonstop on developing relationships to keep a brand top of mind for side mentions like this and to be at the top of the rolodex when a reporter needs a quote or some help understanding an industry or technology space.

It's also entirely possible that the reporter either asked AWS for some customer names and cherry-picked those, or the reporter asked their network for some names. In my experience, it's not paid other than in really shady non-mainstream media sites.

It's an interesting question because many more well know startups use AWS (Airbnb, Pinterest, Etsy, Spotify). Amazon has a webpage specifically to highlight them: http://aws.amazon.com/start-ups/. It's hard to imagine that Instacart would be the startup that would be offered as an example by Amazon or the reporter's network. It wouldn't surprise me if reporter was friends with the founders.

You just did the same thing :)

> When I see a brand name mentioned randomly in an arricle, I wonder who paid for it.

Yes, much of HN seems to think this is an insightful practice. That's all I have to say about that.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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