Amazon to no longer pay for paid search referrals

https://associates.amazon.ca/gp/associates/promo/paidsearch.html

by r7000 • 17 years ago

25 11 17 years ago

associates.amazon.ca

jrockway• 17 years ago

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.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

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

briansmith• 17 years ago

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.

jonknee3• 17 years ago

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

wildwood• 17 years ago

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

ecommercematt• 17 years ago

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

jonknee3• 17 years ago

Not unless they also send people directly to Amazon from paid search ads.

sounddust2• 17 years ago

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.

josefresco• 17 years ago

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.

Amazon to no longer pay for paid search referrals

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