
Amazon Prepares Online Advertising Program - davidst
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/amazon-preps-a-challenge-to-googles-ad-business-1408747979-lMyQjAxMTA0MDIwMjEyNDIyWj
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curiouscats
This is potentially a real risk to Google. The odds of such a huge success it
decreases Google's profits are tiny (I think). But there is a real risk that
the increase in Google's profits going forward are materially affected by a
well done competitor to Adsense.

If Amazon took away 10% of what Google's adsense business 4 years from now
would have been that is likely material to Google's earning. Not huge but
real.

Even losing the ads on Amazon's web site is likely noticeable (though not a
huge deal I would guess).

There is even the potential Google has to reduce their profitability to
compete - giving web sites a better cut of revenue.

That said I think Amazon has plenty of challenges to making it an effective
competitor to Google. But they have a chance. And there is even a small chance
(very small I think) that Amazon could create a competitor that actually
results in noticeably (say over 15%) declining revenue to Google via adsense.
Likely even in this case Google continues to grow profit.

Google revenue from ads from their own websites are the most important
earnings and likely to continue to be so. Also new business (non web-ad-
income) is growing and I think will continue to do so (this is likely an area
some might find more questionable).

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ripberge
Well Google still has the dominant search traffic and that's where the text
ads with real intent behind them get shown and clicked on so this isn't going
to do much.

And as far as people doing product searches on Amazon.com, it's not a great
source of revenue for advertisers. If you want to get _real_ sales from Amazon
customer searches you need to have your products for sale either via Amazon
itself or in the Amazon marketplace. They make way more money that way and
place the way they place ads on their pages reflect that.

Google will retain total dominance in this area as long as a the vast majority
of people use google.com for web searches.

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ohashi
That may be so. But there also may be an opportunity for Amazon to target ads
better than anyone else could. Essentially retargeting for Amazon's platform.

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ripberge
Amazon can re-target better than Google because they know about some products
you browsed on Amazon.com? Google has your entire search history, click
through history, ad-interaction history and a ton of other data to target you.

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bostik
Not browsed. Bought.

Maybe even more importantly, they know which products you returned and why.
Public reviews on items are one thing and likely gameable, the direct merchant
feedback form remains private between the merchant and the customer. And
Amazon, of course, because they mediate the exchange.

For pure marketing purposes that kind of limited view could be quite valuable
indeed.

As to what this means for me? More rules in AdBlock, I guess.

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hownottowrite
From what I understand, they are pitching an agency model. The rate I heard
quoted was $2.50 CPM.

