This guy's publisher is paying Amazon $1/click to show the book to people who are already going to buy the book. It's basically the same thing.

> The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“

But that doesn’t mean the ad is a good investment. It isn’t just about the yield from the ad, but about the DIFFERENCE in yield between having the ad and not having the ad.

It is really simplistic thinking to just look at conversion rates.

Amazon won't care because it's peanuts for them. Sellers will care and will pay amazon more in ad revenue than it will cost in potential sales.

Oh, and you have to pay the building owner for the coupons which also discount your food.

> Advertising as inference not influence.

People buying ads want to influence customers, but the platforms can instead focus on finding the folks who are already going to buy the product and show them the ad in order to gain the sweet sweet attribution saying "I am responsible for the sale".

You can test this by taking your ad-spend and flatly multiply it: if you spend 5 times as much money to advertise to 5 times as many people, but your sales don't also go up by 5x, then the money you were spending at the 1x rate probably wasn't influencing the buyers either, instead the ad companies were merely targeting all the customers you were already going to get sales from.

His trick, well back then for a nickel you could go to a paper vending machine and buy a paper. But it would just open up and you could literally grab all of them if you wanted. So for a month every day he sacrificed a nickel and essentially stole about 20 papers. He then delivered them to non customers along his route for about a month. Then he left a note "if you have enjoyed your free trial of the paper and would like to continue as a customer....". He won the bike hands down and never did tell the paper company how he got so many new starts.

I miss that world.

To Google's credit, they did drop the "Don't be evil" slogan many years ago...

If you can, use Apple maps for now, although Apple has proudly proclaimed that they will be serving ads in maps soon. I also refuse to use the maps.app.goo.gl short links that google maps always wants to send. They will trap you in the compromised google search ecosystem. Insist on using raw addresses. I will paste in the raw address every time someone in a group chat sends a goo.gl link.

If you excuse the effects that people’s actions have because they didn’t realize they were causing them, you guarantee that those effects will never stop.

2. Fraud is a stretch, these things are labelled even if it’s deliberately designed to be difficult to understand. The discovery on this would be fascinating though because I can guarantee you there’s records somewhere of a ticket to make things more deceptive…

3. I don’t think the fraud thing will get you the results you want (I guess this is a slightly ironic statement given what we’re talking about). According to Claude it’s more likely deception under “FTC Act §5” but you can’t directly do this anymore and apparently “Amazon reinstated binding individual arbitration with a class-action waiver in its Conditions of Use, effective 14 August 2026.” So even taking them to court got much much more difficult.

I think unfortunately until a different administration (maybe one less motivated by billionaire donors) comes in, we are stuck with this type of practice.

Incidentally, last week Amazon changed their TOS [0] and now all disputes with them are to be resolved via Arbitration; class action waiver when you use their services, etc.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/amazon-reinstates-b...

Hopefully Seth's publisher knows this?

worked in advertisement, and there's legal precedent to allow bidding on competitor brands (for every advertising network joy).

The day someone can sue me because they searched for something on my web site and what they expected didn't come up, my web site is effectively legally prevented from having a search box.

The action needed here is anti-trust style / monopoly action. If there were viable competitors it wouldn't matter what Amazon's search box does. The fact the US government is in denial about the whole principle of the need for robust anti-trust / competition enforcement that is the core issue here.

The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.

I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.

You said it. I've wondered if the FTC could run through a process like the below to force market evolutions, but I'm certain there's ways to make this into regulatory capture.

Assuming we want free markets...and enough regulations to keep particular monopoloy/cartel from capturing a given free market...:

1. Identify the market: who are the suppliers, who are the demanders

2. Ensure the ratio of suppliers to demanders is such that there are lots of options for a given demander across local, regional, national, international search scopes, are there 7+ local options, 7 regional, etc.?

3. Ensure a given market is vigorously moving, meaning there is plenty of distribution between new market entrants and established incumbents, gate a given incumbent to a market to heightened scrutiny after 10 years or X percentage of the market

4. if a market has lock-in/network effects/increasing switching costs, discount the relative number of suppliers based on <some napkin math of weighting switching costs based on how often customers switch, if customers cannot switch on a dime, look very closely to see if those are natural switching costs or unnatural ones> and take actions to force all suppliers to lower switching costs

5. treat the medium to larger businesses with the most initial suspicion and danger for regulatory capture and bribery, and soft touch sole proprietorships, small businesses, and (non-LARP) startups with less than X percentage cash flow or years of operation

6. Somehow get regulatorially captured, so reform this process to catch the new failure mode(s) without losing lessons of the past.

Businesses need stable regulatory frameworks to build and thrive, but if they are so stable and so 'cheatable' then businesses become sclerotic dinosaurs who don't adapt to the changing conditions on the ground except to protect themselves and their positions.

US GOP members always want to focus on entrepreneur spirits and the power of free markets, but then don't catch when a given market is captured and held by big businesses (see the smartphone maker oligopoly or Luxottica Optical monopoly), probably for corruption/bribery-seeking reasons as much as failure to imagine the negative externalities.

US DNC members always want to focus on stopping big businesses and the power of good governance, but then don't catch when a given market is gummed up by so much regulation, the only survivors are those in bed with the government (see the banking and hospital certificate of need cartels or M.I.Complex defense contractors), probably for corruption/bribery-seeking reasons as much as failure to imagine the negative externalities.

A given market needs to be closer to buyer beware in the beginning, but as it matures, it needs to discover and stop the incumbents (whoever they may be) so nobody is comfortable to sit around and extract rent or do share buybacks or otherwise be lazy - we get 'efficient' businesses that suffer from MBA / Jack Welch LARPers who immiserate their employeees, vendors, and eventually customers themselves (so called encrapification), the regulators should target those companies for hurting the health of the market by buying out competitors, saddling up with corporate raids, private equity sinking otherwise profitable businesses, and general dangerous financialization.

2 is just being bad at business. Which is why I’m skeptical it happens.

3, I hate to break it to you, basically happens in every major store you walk into in America. Google “slotting fees.” If you think customers want an alternative, apply to YC!

[1] The FTC (on your behalf) sued 1-800 contacts for trying this. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/08/...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/warby-parker-fends-...

I'm not really convinced these kinds of "we're just the platform" arguments stack up that well anymore when we see the harm these kinds of unregulated platforms have done to society. Unfortunately though the precedent is already set, so it will be fairly had to backtrack.