
Amazon Knows What You Buy. And It’s Building a Big Ad Business from It - rm2889
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/technology/amazon-ads-advertising.html
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benologist
This is really just a way to tax their 3rd party vendors, having cloned
10,000s of their products already to compete with them.

Now Amazon will either get the sale from dominating results with their massive
in-house product range, or the 3rd party vendor has to buy the sale back via
advertising.

They are being investigated in Europe because of the likelihood they are
selecting which products to clone based on the 3rd party vendors' sales data.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-
antitrust/e...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/eu-
regulators-want-to-know-if-merchants-hurt-by-amazon-copies-idUSKCN1M82IU)

They probably copy online services too, so you can imagine how much growth
opportunity they can measure hosted on AWS by 3rd party developers.

When you think about the risks of building on a platform like Twitter who
might copy your work if you're popular, with Amazon you can see this scaling
from software on AWS all the way to whatever fraction of a penny profit is in
shower curtain hooks.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/)

