[ptlu]

Hello!

I used to working on the AMS self-service advertising team as a developer.

Note all opinions are my own.

When I first joined the advertising team, I was unsure about a product that can have a seedy sort of reputation on the web. But I was very pleasantly surprised how much we care about the customer experience in regards to ads at Amazon.

The end goal is always to show the customer the best item for purchase, and Retail would always set a high bar for the Ads team. This has in-turn caused us to invest a lot into ensuring the relevancy of our ads is top notch, we do not want to display ads which are ineffective - this hurts both the retail customer and the advertiser.

Nothing would get approved without vigorous testing to ensure the ads had a neutral or positive impact on the retail customer.

[RestlessMind]

While I don't doubt your personal integrity, I am sure a Google or Facebook employee would claim the same. After a while, organizational incentives start nudging you in a direction optimal for the company and not necessarily optimal for the user. It starts in slow imperceptible increments and before you know, your product is ad-infested sub-optimal UX.

[ctvo]

Except ads aren't Amazon's primary business or revenue stream. They're incentivized to do exactly what the OP stated.

[RestlessMind]

Or so one would think. But you can try for yourself and see how ad-infested Amazon has become.

To throw a few random examples, I just tried (from Mac / Chrome / Incognito / Signed-out mode), I searched for "sensodyne toothpase". Entire page is full of ads and I have to do a full scroll to see organic non-ads results. Same for "biodegradable trash bags". Almost the same situation for "qtips" though there were 2 partial images of organic search results. Its almost as if I am searching on Google (and no, thats not a compliment).

[tinymollusk]

Not to demean you, personally, but you sound like every other bright eyed ad-team member I've ever spoken with. Have you worked at other "top-tier" advertising platforms like AdWords, or Facebook, or Yelp?

Do you think anyone on the AdWords team feels differently about their product? That's why their public statements are so convincing, because they believe them.

Maybe Amazon's situation is different. Alls I'm saying is that I have no way of knowing.