
Amazon to no longer pay for paid search referrals - r7000
https://associates.amazon.ca/gp/associates/promo/paidsearch.html
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briansmith
Of course this makes perfect sense. Amazon is bidding against its own
affiliates, who are driving up prices and diluting its click-through rates
(thus reducing click-through volume and further increasing its bid prices). In
the cases where they are already the top search result, they don't need or
want AdWords links from themselves or affiliates distracting the user and
costing them money unnecessarily.

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jonknee
And they got other people to finance an extensive keyword conversion study.
What a deal!

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wildwood
Since Amazon was paying these associates a percentage of sales, wouldn't it be
more accurate to say that Amazon financed it?

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teej
Amazon only paid out if the keyword successfully translated into sales. Thus
they only paid if it worked - the affiliate ate the cost if the keyword
failed.

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jrockway
_Q: Was Amazon’s policy on bidding on words such as “amazon,” “endless,” or
“kindle” changed? A: No. Associates are still prohibited from purchasing or
registering Amazon’s proprietary terms such as “amazon,” “endless,” and
“kindle,” and misspellings of those words) to send traffic to any site. Please
refer to the Operating Agreement for more information._

This sounds questionably legal. If I write a book about the Kindle, I can't
buy a search ad to advertise it?

I really like Amazon, but not when I read things like this.

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jonknee
You can buy a search ad to advertise it, you just can't be an Amazon
Associate. Google has rules against trademarks anyway, which could be used if
you really wanted to break their rules.

<http://www.google.com/tm_complaint_adwords.html>

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ecommercematt
Does this impact, say, bloggers who review books and provide a unique URL for
purchasing that book on Amazon on their blog?

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sounddust
No, it affects people who play the game of adsense/affiliate arbitrage - that
is, people who find keywords in which the average CPC of an adwords ad is less
than the average return from the affiliate (which is both very risky, and very
profitable to those who succeed).

Amazon is just trying to take them out of the equation, which makes perfect
sense because they provide nothing of value to Amazon; they are just middlemen
who drive up the cost of Amazon's CPC campaigns and collect commissions from
customers that would have ended up with Amazon anyway.

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josefresco
Don't undervalue the benefit that search arbitrage provides. It finds
inefficiencies in the paid traffic market (which they exploit for a time until
it re-balances), and also serves as a "filter" or refining mechanism of sorts
that helps consumers find products they wouldn't ordinarily.

Just because people are clicking an ad that leads them to another page with
more ads does not mean there's any dilution going on. These websites are
providing a service Google and other can't/won't do.

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sounddust
While I agree that search arbitrage can be good to smooth out imbalances in
CPC prices, I also believe that it does Amazon more harm than good to pay
people who participate in arbitrage.

In the best case scenario (bidding against an affiliate who is good at
arbitrage), Amazon probably breaks even because they get good sales from those
affiliates with whom they're competing for keywords.

But in the worst case scenario, Amazon is competing against their affiliates
who are bad at arbitrage (people who are losing money) and are blocking Amazon
from winning CPC bids without actually effectively converting those clicks to
commissions.

And I would bet that there are far more people losing money to arbitrage
(amateurs who bought some ebook from a spammer about how to make money on the
internet) than people who are profiting.

The net result is that google and yahoo get more money.

