Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Quoted in the Washington Post

I'm quoted in the Washington Post today in an article titled "It’s not your imagination: Shopping on Amazon has gotten worse."

I'm talking about how Amazon used to help (but no longer) for finding and discovering what you want to buy, saying, "The store radically changes based on customer interests, showing programming titles to a software engineer and baby toys to a new mother."

The reporter, Geoffrey Fowler, goes on to say, "This is probably how most of us imagine Amazon still works. But today advertisers are driving the experience ... The Amazon we experience today is pretty much the opposite of how Amazon used to work."

The article is critical of all the ads on Amazon now, which makes the shopping experience terrible. I think it is very hard to find things on Amazon nowadays. This happened for a well-known reason. Increasing ad load -- which is the number of ads on a web page -- will usually increase short-term revenue, but it hurts retention, ad performance, and long-term revenue. As the Washington Post reporter describes, all the ads cause people to go elsewhere when they need to shop, and that has long-term costs for Amazon.

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