Ask HN: What on Earth is going on with Amazon ads? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What on Earth is going on with Amazon ads?

5 pointsA_D_E_P_T4 comments

I was gifted a Kindle Oasis with lockscreen ads. The device is wonderful, though the ads have been misguided at best and real head-scratchers most of the time. Lately, though, they've taken a real turn for the bizarre.

Most of the ads I've been getting are for AI-generated children's bedtime stories with anime-inspired covers. Approximately 0% of my reading consists of bedtime stories, so this is odd -- and it can be a bit embarrassing when my Kindle is left on a coffee table -- though it's ultimately no big deal.

But I've been getting more and more ads that are just plain gibberish. Here's one example: https://i.ibb.co/5xdTJJh/IMG-4893.jpg

"Sleep. Unnllocking the seccelts fon restfulll nights."

How is it in Amazon's best interests to let gibberish onto their platform? Surely it would be a trivial problem to fix? And why are the "authors" paying for ads? What's the business model here? Self-contained AI marketplace?

I hardly ever shop at Amazon anymore because (1) so many of the product listings are word salad, and (2) I've complained and they tell me they don't care.

I opened a Facebook account to use with a Meta Quest 3; I haven't otherwise used Facebook or added friends but it generates a feed for me anyway that looks like subprime spam from after the heat death, on a level of "sketchy" well past the come-ons for pig butchering scams I get on Skype.

Strange - I pay actual money for Amazon ads on Kindle, supposedly to show folks who like my genre my novels.

Amazon chooses to show my ad maybe once a week! They prefer to show trash ads I suppose, I don't know. I can't imagine those trash ads pay nearly what I had to bid to even get my ads to start showing up!

(Amazon auctions off impressions, which means you have to pay nearly your whole book margin to play the game. Essentially, they've sucked up every possible penny of online book sales for almost all books in their catalog.)

Yeah, I don't get it. Ads are apparently quite expensive if you're a legitimate author -- but there's an ocean of total nonsense ads for books that I can't even find via a regular Amazon.com search.

Could it be that they're filler generated by Amazon to make your ads more expensive? What other explanation even makes sense?

as someone who hates ads, I am appalled that people not only buy these devices, but also give them out as _gifts_.

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