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Sources Say Amazon Will Soon Be Targeting Ads, a la Google AdWords

Posted by timothy on from the cookies-are-delicious dept.

According to The Register (citing a paywalled WSJ article), a new face in targeted ads is emerging (according to "people familiar with the matter") to compete with Google, and it's Amazon. They already have a vast, mineable collection of data about customers' buying, listening and viewing habits, so exploiting personalized ads seems a natural follow-on. According to the report, the ad system would replace Google as ad vendor on Amazon itself, and "It is also apparently hoping to beef up its ad placement business on other sites as part of Amazon's strategy to carve its way into Google's multi-billion-dollar AdWords' empire." Pretty soon Amazon will able to just save me time by ordering the things I would have ordered based on ads that they themselves have placed.

9 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. easy solution.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    adblock plus

  2. OK, fine, do it already. by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm OK with targeted ads. I just wish they would figure out how to target them.

    I bought a couple of 'Hello Kitty' flash drives close to a year ago. It was a joke, people kept stealing my generic looking ones. The Hello Kitty sticks stay in my desk. Since then, every other time I log in, Amazon has to breathlessly show me various Hello Kitty things. An impressive panoply of products, but ones that I'm not especially interested in.

    Try to buy something for a gift? Well, idiot algorithm thinks you're going to buy the same thing for the next six months....

    You'd think it this was easy.

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    1. Re:OK, fine, do it already. by Dragon+Bait · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm OK with targeted ads. I just wish they would figure out how to target them.

      On the desktop version of Amazon, go to "Your Account" on the top right next to the search bar, then "Your Recommendations" from the drop down. Under the search bar there should be a "Improve Your Recommendations" link. Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."

      Note: If anyone cares, I do not work for Amazon any more than any of their other customers do.

    2. Re:OK, fine, do it already. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Find your "Hello Kitty" purchase and click "Don't use for recommendations."

      Mod parent up! GP is complaining about a problem that actually has a known solution, which Amazon has been reasonable enough to implement.

      GP is complaining about the precise behavior that allowed him to accomplish his goal in ordering the flash drive. Amazon obviously profiled people and predicts that the demographic who will buy "Hello Kitty" products is very specific, and most people do NOT want that stuff.

      GP's argument is thus actually proof that Amazon's algorithm is probably working well. GP chose a product that would be undesirable for most of his coworkers for the very reason that it's something of a niche product. By buying such a product, GP identified himself to the algorithm as one of those few people (unlike his coworkers) who would want such a product.

      Now he expects Amazon to just intuit that he's some sort of exception to that general rule (which in this case, is probably a very good rule, or someone would have stolen GP's flash drives by now).

      I'm not saying Amazon's recommendations couldn't be improved -- but this particular example is very poor. And if GP wants to fix his recommendations, Amazon has a system specifically designed to allow this.

    3. Re:OK, fine, do it already. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.

      GP wasn't complaining about advertising. He was talking about recommendations -- and he obviously wants to have better recommendations or he wouldn't bother looking at them at all. So, if he's looking at recommendations, chances are he would like to improve them -- and if that requires just a few clicks, it might actually be worth it to him.

      I, personally, haven't looked at Amazon's recommendations in years. I don't care what they say or how accurate they are. If they were listing a bunch of Hello Kitty products, I wouldn't go around complaining about it, because I never even notice the recommendations. GP obvious does, which implies he pays some attention to them. If he wants to improve them, Amazon has a mechanism for doing so.

      As to your assertion that regular people wouldn't help advertising companies, I'm not so sure about that. Slashdot is full of a bunch of people who never want to see ads. (I'm one of them.) I'm never going to even look at an ad, so the only thing I ever want to see on an ad is the quickest way to close it.

      But, believe it or not, there are people in the world who look at ads. And some companies have been moving to a model that forces people to watch ads. In those cases, assuming I'd actually use the service at all (which I probably wouldn't, but others might), I'd appreciate a little box that says, "I don't want to see ads like this one again." If I'm being forced to look at an ad anyway, I might as well take that time to click something that will make that ad go away and put something better next time.

    4. Re:OK, fine, do it already. by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      Now you are really off in lala land. The recommendations are on the same page as the products he's looking at. Noting them is not the same as seeking them out.

      What version of Amazon's page do you visit? If I go to an Amazon product page, I see links to "Items Frequently Bought Together," "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." and "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed..." and things like that. Perhaps those are personalized to some extent, but those products are mostly based on what product page you're actually on and on what others have bought -- not on whether you bought a random unrelated "Hello Kitty" product.

      To get to see personalized recommendations for random products, I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page past just about any content I normally would want to see. Frankly, until just now when you pointed this out to me, I never even noticed they were down there... because I would have no reason to scroll down past all the other random stuff on product pages unless I specifically wanted to see them.

      I think most people, if they want to see their personalized recommendations, either go to Amazon's homepage, or they click on a link to see information on your account, where you can find "Recommended for you" or whatever. I NEVER seek these things out myself, so the only time I've seen these is occasionally when I've clicked on some "My account" link for something else that took me to a page with them.

      Bottom line: I can't recall actually even SEEING what Amazon recommends for me based on my purchases in at least a couple years. GP obviously seems to notice this on a regular basis since he bought his flash drives.

      So, either he (and you?) visit some alternate reality version of Amazon's website, or you're both seeking out these recommendations... because I can't remember the last time I even saw the recommendations, let alone "noted" what might have been in them.

    5. Re:OK, fine, do it already. by larryjoe · · Score: 2

      The idea that regular people will curate the advertising data used to profile them is a huge non-starter.

      Somehow the geekboy bias of slashdot thinks it's a great idea to make the effort to do Amazon's or Google's job of making targeted ads non-annoying. For normal people, configuring ads on Amazon's behalf is obviously annoying and is obviously a non-starter.

      Of course, the real solution is not to do Amazon's job for them. The real solution is to block ads. No, the websites won't go away. Corporations are hooked on money and will find another way to stay in business.

  3. Re:Amazon? Really? by ladislavb · · Score: 2

    They've been doing it already. They started about two or three weeks ago when, as an Amazon affiliate, I was given an opportunity to create Amazon ads and to place them on my website. So far so good - the CPM is decent (just over a $1) and even though it hasn't been able to beat AdSense, it is still much better than most other networks I've tried in the past. The fill rate hangs around 30% at the moment. It looks promising.

  4. Compete with Google? by m00sh · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google tracks a large portion of the websites you visit, including slashdot. They have a more detailed browsing history. If you use gmail, they probably have all your purchasing history as well (including Amazon). Not to mention your search history. So, Amazon has a fraction of the data that Google would have on a person.

    The only thing that Amazon has over Google is that you use Amazon ads and if a visitor buys something, you get a nice 4% commission. But, I don't know if big money will come from that - it's just blogs.