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It's not hard to imagine that Amazon has created a situation where groups within the company are incented to drive up this high-margin ad income (no annoying logistics! no inventory!), divorced from the "external" fallout of ever-so-slowly turning the site into garbage.

eBay, have you anything to say about this? Or how about you, Hewlett Packard?

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Ad revenue is easy to measure. Long term erosion of the trust of your users isn’t.

Metric-driven decision making is not a silver bullet.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." —Goodhart's law

I really doubt that it’s difficult to measure proxies for user trust. Return rates, conversion rates, search funnels, customer feedback ratings, basket size, prime churn rate, etc.

I'm sure lots of e-commerce companies feel this pressure. Where I work, an Additional Revenue team was created for this kind of thing - sponsored results, ads, cross-sells, etc. It's viewed as free money on the table, since it is relatively easy to estimate the income and the dev work required, but much harder to measure user experience and customer loyalty.

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