The Amazon tax / 亚马逊税

The Amazon tax 亚马逊税

It’s not technically a tax. Taxes produce valuable public benefits, like medical research and parks. This is simply legal theft. Amazon makes nearly a billion dollars in profit from search ads. Every week. Each week, they sell merchants and publishers enough search-distorting ads to capture a billion dollars in revenue. Amazon makes enough in search ad revenue to give every single one of their employees a $35,000 cash bonus and still have change left over. 从技术上讲，这并不是税。税收会产生有价值的公共利益，比如医学研究和公园。而这纯粹是合法的盗窃。亚马逊每周从搜索广告中赚取近十亿美元的利润。每周，他们向商家和出版商出售足以扭曲搜索结果的广告，从而获取十亿美元的收入。亚马逊仅靠搜索广告收入就足以给每一位员工发放 3.5 万美元的现金奖金，且仍有盈余。

My publisher is terrific, and they’re working hard to introduce people to my new book. Last week, they began buying search ads on Amazon. At first glance, this is compelling. Someone who isn’t sure what they’re looking for, who is looking for a book or a kitchen appliance, might find one if the right ad showed up at the right time. But of course, that’s not what yields, or what most of the ads you see on Amazon do. 我的出版商非常出色，他们正在努力向人们推介我的新书。上周，他们开始在亚马逊上购买搜索广告。乍一看，这很有吸引力。如果有人不确定自己在找什么，或者正在寻找一本书或一件厨房电器，那么在合适的时间出现合适的广告，他们或许就能找到目标。但当然，这并不是广告的实际产出，也不是你在亚马逊上看到的大多数广告的作用。

If you’re searching for an air fryer, Amazon already knows quite a bit. They know the best-reviewed, least-returned, best-priced model. The only purpose of the ads is to get you to pick an air fryer that isn’t that one (or for the best air fryer, to keep you on track to buy the one you wanted in the first place). The ads make the search worse. [Cory wrote about this three years ago, and the scale has already doubled.] 如果你在搜索空气炸锅，亚马逊其实已经掌握了相当多的信息。他们知道哪款型号评价最好、退货率最低、价格最划算。这些广告的唯一目的就是让你选择那款“非最优”的空气炸锅（或者对于最好的那款空气炸锅，则是为了确保你继续购买你最初想要的那一个）。这些广告让搜索体验变得更糟。[Cory 三年前就写过这个问题，而现在的规模已经翻了一番。]

When there are plenty of ads, the maker of the best air fryer now has to bid on ads as well, if only to protect the sales they were entitled to in the first place. Businesses continue to buy the ads—not because they’re dumb, but because the system has created a situation with few options. Folklore implies that buying the ads somehow shifts how search responds in the long run, even after the ads stop running, but there’s little data to confirm this. 当广告泛滥时，最好的空气炸锅制造商现在也不得不参与广告竞价，哪怕只是为了保护他们本应获得的销售额。企业继续购买广告——不是因为他们愚蠢，而是因为这个系统制造了一种几乎别无选择的局面。坊间传言称，购买广告在长期内会改变搜索结果的响应方式，即使在广告停止投放后依然有效，但几乎没有数据能证实这一点。

Traditional ads increase demand. We see something that’s clearly an ad, it might spark desire, and sales go up. But zero-sum search ads aren’t like that–the total sales in the category stay the same, and merchants are merely competing for a share of a static pie. This study argues that an ecommerce site with search ads actually sells fewer items than the same site without ads. 传统广告会增加需求。我们看到明显的广告，可能会激发购买欲望，从而带动销售。但零和博弈的搜索广告并非如此——该类别的总销售额保持不变，商家只是在争夺一块固定蛋糕的份额。这项研究指出，带有搜索广告的电商网站，其商品销量实际上比没有广告的同类网站更少。

The highest-yielding ad my publisher has tested so far is the search “Seth Godin The Knot“. It costs about a dollar per click. My publisher is paying Amazon a dollar to show you an ad for the book you went to buy in the first place. Who ends up paying the more than $50 billion a year spent on these ads? It’s not the sellers. Sellers can’t make heartfelt donations for long. It’s you. 我出版商目前测试出的转化率最高的广告是搜索“Seth Godin The Knot”。每次点击成本约为一美元。我的出版商支付给亚马逊一美元，只是为了向你展示你本来就打算购买的那本书的广告。谁最终支付了每年在这类广告上花费的超过 500 亿美元的费用？不是卖家。卖家无法长期进行这种“慈善捐赠”。是你。

By making the marketing of products significantly less efficient, Amazon’s theft makes products more expensive or sucks the energy out of the development of new products. It leads to two perverse side effects. First, producers realize that if brand reputation matters less than a budget for clicks, they will shift to shoddy and cheap versions of their products so they have a bigger budget for clicks. And second, Amazon (and Google before it) have an incentive to make their organic search results worse–giving producers more incentive to buy more ads. 通过大幅降低产品营销的效率，亚马逊的这种“盗窃”行为要么让产品变得更贵，要么抽干了新产品研发的动力。这导致了两个反常的副作用。首先，生产商意识到，如果品牌声誉不如点击预算重要，他们就会转向生产劣质廉价的产品，以便有更多的预算用于点击竞价。其次，亚马逊（以及之前的谷歌）有动力让其自然搜索结果变得更糟，从而促使生产商更有动力去购买更多的广告。

For decades, Amazon created value for consumers by lowering the price of just about everything. And they opened the doors to merchants who didn’t have sufficient distribution. They claimed to be customer-centric, and they were. I don’t think they can claim this any longer. The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for. Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve. 几十年来，亚马逊通过降低几乎所有商品的价格为消费者创造了价值。他们为那些缺乏足够分销渠道的商家敞开了大门。他们声称自己以客户为中心，事实也确实如此。但我认为他们现在已经无法再这样标榜自己了。他们建立的广告系统并不违法，但很明显它是为谁服务的。亚马逊正在从他们声称要服务的客户身上进行掠夺。