EDIT: what I wrote here probably isn’t correct (see comments from Jeff below)
My understanding (I can’t remember my source for this) is that it’s less about charitable giving and more motivated by a war against Google for revenue. I’d give a c.60% chance that this accurately describes Amazon’s motivations.
Without Amazon Smile:
Someone googles “Trousers from Amazon” (or whatever)
When the user clicks on an ad on google’s search results and goes to an Amazon page, Amazon gives Google some money
If the customer than goes to make a purchase, Amazon gives google a bit more money
I’m imagining a (fictional) dialogue between two Amazon employees:
“Can we convince the user to go to a copy of this webpage which has a different url? then we don’t pay the money to google?”
“Why would they do they do that?”
“We could pay the customer an amount less than the amount we pay to google?”
“But the amount Amazon would give to the customer would be so paltry”
“What if the money goes to charity instead? People are much more scope insensitive about charitable giving”
My propensity to believe this story is mostly because it seems to explain Amazon’s behaviour in a way that sounds difficult to understand otherwise. My credence in this would be higher than c.60% if it were verified by a high quality source.
So if they’re closing the programme, I’m wondering if the benefits of recouping ad spend from Google is no longer big enough to warrant the costs of the running the Smile system.
Oh really? I’m no expert on google ads, but I thought it was common to have “conversions”, and to pay more if a certain pre-defined event occurs (and a purchase is an example of a conversion).
I suspect Jeff knows more about google ads than I do, so maybe I should adjust my 60% number down.
An advertiser can choose to pay per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is always up to the advertiser. They don’t need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping.
(Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google’s estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they’ll put in on your behalf are lower, and you’ll lose lots of auctions you’d have preferred to win.)
EDIT: what I wrote here probably isn’t correct (see comments from Jeff below)
My understanding (I can’t remember my source for this) is that it’s less about charitable giving and more motivated by a war against Google for revenue. I’d give a c.60% chance that this accurately describes Amazon’s motivations.
Without Amazon Smile:
Someone googles “Trousers from Amazon” (or whatever)
When the user clicks on an ad on google’s search results and goes to an Amazon page, Amazon gives Google some money
If the customer than goes to make a purchase, Amazon gives google a bit more money
I’m imagining a (fictional) dialogue between two Amazon employees:
“Can we convince the user to go to a copy of this webpage which has a different url? then we don’t pay the money to google?”
“Why would they do they do that?”
“We could pay the customer an amount less than the amount we pay to google?”
“But the amount Amazon would give to the customer would be so paltry”
“What if the money goes to charity instead? People are much more scope insensitive about charitable giving”
My propensity to believe this story is mostly because it seems to explain Amazon’s behaviour in a way that sounds difficult to understand otherwise. My credence in this would be higher than c.60% if it were verified by a high quality source.
So if they’re closing the programme, I’m wondering if the benefits of recouping ad spend from Google is no longer big enough to warrant the costs of the running the Smile system.
This isn’t consistent with how Google charges for ads, though?
Oh really? I’m no expert on google ads, but I thought it was common to have “conversions”, and to pay more if a certain pre-defined event occurs (and a purchase is an example of a conversion).
I suspect Jeff knows more about google ads than I do, so maybe I should adjust my 60% number down.
An advertiser can choose to pay per conversion instead of per click, but whether to send the conversion ping is always up to the advertiser. They don’t need to use something like Smile to get an excuse for not sending the ping: they can just not send the ping.
(Why send pings at all? The reason to pay per conversion is to let Google optimize for sending you the cheapest traffic that converts. Your bids still end up in auctions against others, though, and if Google’s estimate of how likely this traffic is to convert on your site is lower, the bids they’ll put in on your behalf are lower, and you’ll lose lots of auctions you’d have preferred to win.)
Possibly this analysis is correct, but with respect to affiliate links rather than Google ads?
And/or reducing costs from the affiliate marketing program using the same logic.