Amazon is slowly building a new part of its advertising behemoth - Advertising on third-party domains. Until 2023, Amazon Advertising focused on advertising on the Amazon platform aimed at its sellers.
On Prime Day this year - Buy with Prime partners were able to drive traffic off of Amazon. Sponsored Display was opened to non-Amazon sellers. In April recently, Pinterest announced that Amazon would be its first third-party advertising partner, interestingly Pinterest announced that the partnership is showing early signs of success.
Amazon announced this week that various websites and apps will be starting to show Amazon Sponsored Products ads on their websites. Launch partners are Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, Raptive, and Ziff Davis brands like Lifehacker and Mashable.
What does this mean?
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One of Amazon’s most significant advertising programs is its affiliate product called Amazon Associates, in which publishers can add Amazon links to Amazon product detail pages and then generate a commission from Amazon when a customer buys an item. By displaying Amazon Sponsored Products on third-party websites - Amazon essentially makes Amazon Associates redundant as publishers do not need to do anything but rather drive traffic to Amazon.
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Publishers want to showcase relevant advertising alongside their content rather than use solutions such as Outbrain to monetize it. Amazon advertising leverages machine learning and likely will not have irrelevant or banned/illegal products be displayed to consumers.
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Amazon continues to impact Google’s advertising negatively business, and the 2023 announcement continues to grow their solutions for sellers, non-Amazon partners, and publishers.
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Amazon is aggregating the web and will enable sellers to generate sales from websites that leverage Amazon advertising and have the logistics solutions to get consumers the items shipped to them,
I wonder if this starts Amazon investing less in Google advertising (down the line) and becoming more self-sufficient.