Amazon offers $10 to Prime Day shoppers who hand over their data

[steven36]

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc has a promotion for U.S. shoppers on Prime Day, the 48-hour marketing blitz that started Monday: Earn $10 of credit if you let Amazon track the websites you visit.

 

 

The deal is for new installations of the Amazon Assistant, a comparison-shopping tool that customers can add to their web browsers. It fetches Amazon’s price for products that users see on Walmart.com, Target.com and elsewhere.

 

In order to work, the assistant needs access to users’ web activity, including the links and some page content they view. The catch, as Amazon explains in the fine print, is the company can use this data to improve its general marketing, products and services, unrelated to the shopping assistant.

 

The terms underscore the power consumers routinely give to Amazon and other big technology companies when using their free services. In this case, Amazon gains potential insight into how it should tailor marketing and how it could stamp out the retail competition.

 

“This data is often used for training machine learning models to do better ad targeting,” said Bennett Cyphers, a technologist at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “But in the U.S., there aren’t really restrictions on what you can do with this kind of data.”

 

Amazon already has more than 7 million customers using its assistant via Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, according to data published by those web browsers. Other companies offer similar shopping tools.

 

While another technology known as tracking pixels shows Amazon information from visitors to roughly 15 percent of the top 10,000 websites, the assistant lets Amazon follow a smaller set of users from page to page, Cyphers said.

 

Amazon’s combination of tools still pales in comparison to data collection by Alphabet Inc’s Google, which has tracking pixels on most web pages.

 

Amazon did not discuss how it uses the data it gathers via the assistant for any unrelated purposes, but a job listing for an affiliated team known as Browser Integration Technologies says the group’s influence “spans across advertising and marketing, pricing and selection.”

 

“Customer trust is paramount to Amazon, and we take customer privacy very seriously,” a company spokeswoman said, noting compliance with the assistant’s privacy policy, which says data collection is for websites that users visit “where we may have relevant product or service recommendations.”

 

The policy also notes that customers can disable certain features of the assistant, and that Amazon only links browsing data to an individual’s account when the assistant is in active use.

 

U.S. lawmakers have recently increased their scrutiny of Silicon Valley’s data collection practices. A bill introduced in the Senate last month proposed requiring that big platforms disclose what information they gather from users and how much that is worth.

 

Source

[lolsee2]

As hard as it might be to believe, Amazon doesn't actually profit off it's market services. Amazon Web Services is apparently where all their profit is and they run Amazon marketplace at a loss.

 

The reality is that when it comes to selling things online, there's not that much profit to be had so it shouldn't be surprising that Amazon's continually trying different ways to try to net a profit but in the meantime just end up stomping their competitors out of business.

 

It's a business model similar to Microsoft's Xbox who for years lost millions of dollars but only survived because of massive profit from Microsoft's other divisions (Windows & Office).

[steven36]

1 hour ago, lolsee2 said:

As hard as it might be to believe, Amazon doesn't actually profit off it's market services. Amazon Web Services is apparently where all their profit is and they run Amazon marketplace at a loss.

Not true at all , they make a profit  just not as much as they do with there Web Services. Do you ever do any research before  you comment?

 

The truth is there not transparent about how much they make off there market services ,but they make Billions of dollars  a year and there profit form them grows more  everyday .

---

Amazon’s big new business: Here’s how much advertising revenue the company generated in 2018  January 31, 2019

 

Amazon posted quarterly revenue of $3.4 billion for its “Other” category, which “primarily includes sales of advertising services, as well as sales related to our other service offerings,” according to financial statements. Amazon does not break out specific financials for advertising.

 

On a call with reporters Thursday, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky called it a “strong” quarter for advertising, which is quickly becoming one of Amazon’s most lucrative businesses, in addition to its e-commerce engine and cloud computing.

 

Advertising drives a majority of revenue for fellow tech giants including Google and Facebook, which charge advertisers to have their marketing content appear on search results or news feeds.

 

Amazon employs a similar strategy, but instead with its online marketplace and other platforms, giving vendors, authors, and others a way to reach potential customers. One of its main competitive advantages is the data it has on purchasing habits.

 

“Ad solutions to help you find, attract, and engage millions of Amazon customers at every stage of their journey,” Amazon’s advertising homepage reads.

 

eMarketer, which pegs the U.S. digital ad market at $111 billion, forecasted that Amazon would surpass Microsoft in U.S. advertising revenues in 2018, moving into third place behind Google and Facebook.

 

“Its strong handle on consumer purchase behavior sets it apart from Google and Facebook in the digital ad market, which has made the company an attractive option for advertisers,” said Monica Peart, senior director of forecasting for eMarketer a commentary that accompanied the September report.

 

One driver of the growth for Amazon in 2018 was due to an accounting change, which added $1 billion to the fourth quarter number. But still — advertising is clearly generating billions annually in revenue for Amazon, with more on the way. Amazon is expected to reach $38 billion in advertising sales by 2023, according to Pivotal Research.

 

Perhaps more importantly, advertising is a high-margin business, helping Amazon grow its profit — a metric investors watch closely.

 

On a call with analysts Thursday, Amazon said in recent months it has expanded sponsored brand placements, rolled out new campaign reports, and continues to build features that make it easier for companies to use its advertising services.

 

Given the company’s activity in various industries, Amazon’s ad business goes further than just e-commerce, extending into movies, TV, gaming, voice products, live sports, and even cardboard boxes — Verizon is placing ads on Amazon packages, The New York Times reported. Grocery purchasing data from its acquisition of Whole Foods can give Amazon more insight into brick-and-mortar advertising strategies. Amazon also allows sellers to buy ads for products not offered on Amazon.

 

Many startups have emerged around helping marketers navigate Amazon’s advertising platform, including several in the Seattle region: InsightLeap, Downstream, Gradient, and Stackline.

 

Amazon’s growing advertising business is another example of its battle with Alphabet-owned Google. The companies compete across a number of areas such as voice technology, cloud computing, and online shopping. Amazon has become a formidable e-commerce search engine, competing with Google to be the first place where shoppers start when they want to buy products online.

 

Source

 

Here is a newer article on it from June 2019 even 

 

THE RISE OF AMAZON ADVERTISING: This is exactly what Amazon is doing to siphon billions of ad dollars from Google and Facebook and why brands love it

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-rise-of-amazon-advertising-2019-5

 

They  done past Microsoft  in like 10 years they most likely will be passed Facebook  in advertising services  and competing  with Google .

 

 

[funkyy]

$10 for your data??? Talk about selling your soul!!!

[Infinite_Vision]

Steve36 is correct.  Some of these big companies will take losses for a couple of years so that they can squeeze the smaller guys out of business.  In addition, they can write off those losses on their tax returns, thus, some of them play zero taxes.  Read this article two days ago.  This is how YouTube does it. 

"YouTube's Trampled Foes Plot Antitrust Revenge"

[JohnnyBravo41]

don't forget about how much they (Amazon) make off of their advertising through "The Washington Post"

 

~snicker~

 

edit: been here over 10 years, still says I am a "New Member", LOL