Not all ads are created equally sleazy. The privacy harms from surveillance ads, though real, are often hard to pin down. But there’s another kind of ad – or “ad” that picks your pocket every time you use an ecommerce site.
This is the “sponsored listing” ad, which allows merchants to bid to be among the top-ranked items in response to your searches – whether or not their products are a good match for your query. These aren’t “ads” in the way that, say, a Facebook ad is an ad. These are more #payola, a form of bribery that’s actually a crime (but not when Amazon does it).
Amazon is the global champion of payola. It boasts of $31 billion in annual “ad” revenue. That’s $31 billion that Amazon sellers have to recoup from you. But Amazon’s use of “most favored nation” deals (which requires sellers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon) mean that you don’t see those price-hikes because sellers raise their prices everywhere.
Sponsored product ads always gave me the message: “Our product isn’t good enough on its own merits, so the only way it’ll sell is if we pay to signal boost it.” It was pretty much an auto-skip for me.
If the exact product I’m looking for comes up as a sponsored listing, I will scroll further down to find the non-sponsered listing just because I hate sponsored ads so much. Not sure if this makes a difference though.
While I already did that out of spite, my AdGuard home setup won’t even let me click on the sponsored links, they literally don’t work.
I have this issue with dns-based adblockers and it caused enough annoyance that I stopped using one frequently. Like, sometimes I click the sponsored one intentionally, and I just want it to work. I wish the sponsored listing didn’t exist, but if it’s the exact thing I wanted I’m not gonna scroll down to re-find the unsponsored listing.
uBlock origin for handles this super well. It’ll just be like “hey this site is in your lists, do you wanna load it this one time anyways, since it’s the actual page you are navigating to?”. Safari’s content blocking allows you to temporarily disable it which is more convenient than reconfiguring dns but nowhere near as good as uBO.
Yeah, sadly that’s just plum impossible with dns based blocking. My wife hates it, but for most of the times she wants it to work on her phone, she knows she can just go on 5G. On PC the sponsored stuff is all cut out automatically.
This seems to be the reason why I don’t use Amazon very much anymore. Almost every time I search for something, most, if not all, of the results have nothing to do with what I wanted. I can’t be the only one who has stopped using them because of this.
Anyone have better recommendations for online shopping?
I use Newegg for most tech stuff now, besides that I try to buy direct from manufacturer websites and just use search engines to find products/brands to buy. My wife and I got away from Amazon because the subscription fees are not worth the free shipping, and basically all of the “sales” are the same cost as the manufacturer website or anywhere else
I haven’t paid for prime in two years. When you check out, switch to free shipping. My packages usually arrive earlier than the date they show (that incentivizes prime).
I’m happy… and patient to save all that money they want.
I dropped Newegg when they started bundling GPUs with shit hardware during the pandemic. Some of them known for literally exploding.
