[Enginerrrd]

>Some retailers like Amazon and Walmart make a significant chunk (if not the majority) of their revenue from retail advertising

That explains why amazon search results keep getting worse. I just thought they were having a problem with people gaming the system.

That's a pretty anti-consumer use of their large market share and lack of competition in my opinion.

[novagameco]

All ecommerce sites do this if they can; it's just difficult for the smaller sites to normalize product information and share user browsing data across DSPs. Grocery stores have been doing it for decades: when you see a display on the endcap at the end of an aisle, that's a product which has paid Target or Kroger for the prime real estate.

The company I work for is working on a retail media system so that smaller ecommerce sites can get paid to promote results by advertisers in the same way that they can get paid to show banner ads: the advertiser knows nothing about the retailer and vice-versa. The advertiser offers their products on our DSP and the ecommerce site makes their inventory available to us on our SSP and we connect the two

[nradov]

So in other words you are contributing to the enshittification of e-commerce, giving the smaller sites the same hostile customer experience as Amazon. I don't blame you, might as well make some money off the trend while you can. But I doubt that this will end well for the sites themselves. If they can't deliver a better experience than Amazon then customers will just stick with Amazon.

[novagameco]

The way I see it (and the way I see all OpenRTB advertising) is that we are helping to give a competitive edge to smaller, more independent sites so that they can survive against huge corporations like Amazon. Without higher yield advertising, independent publishers and new organizations can't survive and ecommerce sites can't compete. Unless people start paying for subscriptions to certain services or choosing to utilize smaller businesses at a higher cost and slower delivery times (which they will do neither of willingly), the open advertising system is the financial engine which keeps the internet from consolidating into a walled garden of just a handful of sites.