This has been discussed on HN before.

The last time I saw an Amazon employee weigh in, he said the ads are in fact not effective but the ad team isn't measuring it well. In particular, he claimed that he showed them that after adjusting for returns, the order-again rate for a particular expensive item was effectively zero, they asked him to repeat his study for another product, and he wandered off and found work to do for his own team.

My skepticism level remains high. This is billions of dollars, with easy access to tons of data.

I'm not sure if put more stock in the government successfully hiding a fake moon landing, or analysts in one of history's most successful companies not running the numbers.

I think the problem here is that "recommendations that maximize expected marketing revenue" and "recommendations that maximize user experience" are not the same. Most of us would prefer Google to present us the latter, but they have considerable financial incentives to present the former instead.

> "recommendations that maximize expected marketing revenue" and "recommendations that maximize user experience" are not the same

That, I think, hits the nail on the head.

I think it explains the Amazon case quite well. I'm not so sure sure about the YouTube idiocy.

The mixer probability maybe went from 1% to 2% but there must be 100s of other products they could show that have much higher probability. Maybe a mixing bowl or a cookbook?

I'll take that bet. Show us the marketing data.

So far it looks just as dumb to me.