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Amazon’s Ad Network is Not a Game Changer


Many may have seen something about the Amazon ad networks online advertising. This is not a game-changer. Amazon is part of Google’s Search Partner Network. That means that users running ads on Google Search may have their ads appear on Amazon search result pages. With this move, Amazon will only be cutting into Google’s market share only in the manner of protecting Amazon’s own market share. Amazon may branch out and do other things like retargeting, later, but for now, this is not a competition in search.

Amazon is the big boy in product selling, naturally. Google’s Product Listing Ads has been Google’s way to bring Google Shopping to their main Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).  Thus, Google has been trying to muscle in on Amazon’s territory. For us marketers, this is only an issue for those running eCom sites.

If you want more news that seems exciting but isn’t, Google “yahoo gemini”. Yahoo! is tired of receiving disappointing revenue from Bing Ads, but they’re not ready to jump ship just yet. Their contract stipulates that Bing Ads will serve desktop ads for Yahoo! Search. So, several months back they launched their own search-based ad platform for mobile devices. They’ve started by only serving up the biggest Yahoo! customers, but this may expand to all. They are Yahoo! customers at a certain dollar amount spend (I think $8,000/month). This may sound exciting until you realize the paltry volume of Yahoo! Search on mobile devices. Without a partner mobile network like Apple, who cares?

Who are some of the partners that could swing percentages? More partners of Google Search are Ask.com and AOL. Bing landed the upcoming Siri deal, which might have a little impact if Siri is any better, but what happens if Apple’s Safari or Mozilla’s Firefox jumped off the Google bandwagon? Well, someone would have to prove they can better generate revenue, and Microsoft keeps lagging way behind.

Oh, did you hear that Bing is going to copy Google’s jump into Close Variants? Really, someone is going to have to do better if they’re looking at knocking Google off the mountaintop.

Edit: Since writing this blog a couple days ago, the news was released about Amazon buying the streaming gaming company, Twitch, out from under Google’s nose. Amazon’s ad networks online advertising platform is likely more than just coincidence. But it is clear they have been working on the ad platform idea for some time; longer than they would have known they were landing the Twitch deal.


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