Corporate Sector > What are Amazon doing now? [Public]
Is this why Amazon is phasing out also-boughts?
Joe Vasicek:
It has been known for some time that for purposes of book rank, Amazon treats a KU borrow the same as a sale, even if the borrower never reads the book. If 80% of the page reads come from 20% of the KU borrowers, then for every KU subscriber who borrows and reads a book, four or five others borrowed it and never read the whole thing—but all of those borrows counted toward book rank. Whereas if 80% of book sales come from 20% of the readers who downloaded the free sample, then there are four or five of those readers for every sale—but only the first counts for book rank. Since the Amazon algorithm uses rank as one of the key factors when determining which books to recommend, enrolling a book in KU gives it a significant boost—or so the logic goes.
So I was listening to the most recent SPA Girls podcast, in which they interviewed Alex Newton from K-lytics, and I was surprised to hear him say that according to his data, enrolling a book in KU does not confer preferential treatment from the Amazon algorithms. At first, I didn't think that could be true, but then I realized that it made sense if the 80:20 rule no longer applies to book sales. Thus, instead of 80% of book sales coming from 20% of readers who download the free sample or otherwise visit the book page, it's closer to a 1:1 ratio.
If that is indeed the case, then it means that Amazon is less a place where people come to discover new books/authors and more a place to find books/authors that they discovered elsewhere. In other words, readers are turning away from Amazon's book recommendations and more to things like group promotions, newsletter swaps, BookBub, Facebook, YouTube, and other places to find new books and authors. Perhaps this is why Amazon has been slowly phasing out also boughts, or pushing them further down the page: because that's not how readers are discovering new books in 2020.
Thoughts?
Jeff Tanyard:
The also-boughts didn't just disappear from book pages, though. They disappeared from other kinds of product pages. It's particularly frustrating when you're shopping for tools or something where you need to also shop for accessories. That sort of thing--accessories--is where the "frequently bought together" thing just isn't good enough because it doesn't give you enough options.
For me, the also-boughts didn't go missing until a few months ago. Then they were gone for most of this calendar year. Now, though, they seem to be returning. For example, Joe, I see seven pages of also-boughts on your Brothers in Exile page.
I've always held onto the belief--and this is just my own guesswork here, so take it for what it's worth--that the disappearing also-boughts was a symptom of server strain. The elements on the product page load individually, not all at once, and that tells me they're powered by different servers. When Amazon got into video streaming in a big way, I think they underestimated the server capacity they would need in order to keep the whole store running smoothly, and the result was the also-bought equivalent of rolling brownouts. And also-vieweds, too, because those would sometimes fail to load, too, and whatever else would occasionally go missing.
Other have postulated A/B testing, and I'm not going to discount that possibility, either. Until Amazon spills the beans about it, we're all just theorizing.
So no, I don't think the disappearing also-boughts have anything to do with KU due to the fact that they disappeared from other kinds of products, too, not just books, and they seem to disappear and reappear in a random fashion rather than as part of a discernible plan.
As for how the algorithm treats KU and rank, I have no idea. I'll leave that to the podcasters to suss out.
TimothyEllis:
I've noticed very little absence of also-boughts this year.
What is totally absent is follower emails, and about 80% of the advertising emails they used to send out.
The mail server seems to be the most overloaded one. And they cut down non-essential emails to cover the amount of sales emails needing to be sent.
It's not so much people turning away from Amazon's book recommendations, so much as Amazon isn't making many these days.
And I just noticed, none of my books I looked at had an AMS slider on them. Also-boughts, also-viewed, what they bought next. No AMS.
notthatamanda:
I just checked mine and the first book I looked at has "Books you may like" and Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" in the first page of the carousel. :icon_question: I haven't looked for a book for that age group in five years. I do love Dr. Seuss so maybe the algos are smarter than me.
That's followed by the sponsored carousel.
I think they change stuff up frequently at least in part to eliminate the selective blindness users get. Having a different title on the carousel draws the eye. Just a guess.
TimothyEllis:
--- Quote from: notthatamanda on June 21, 2020, 10:53:25 PM ---I just checked mine and the first book I looked at has "Books you may like" and Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the places you'll go" in the first page of the carousel. :icon_question: I haven't looked for a book for that age group in five years. I do love Dr. Seuss so maybe the algos are smarter than me.
That's followed by the sponsored carousel.
I think they change stuff up frequently at least in part to eliminate the selective blindness users get. Having a different title on the carousel draws the eye. Just a guess.
--- End quote ---
You know, that sparked a thought.......
What if......
Books with a sponsored bar only have them because someone is using that book or author in their AMS keywords?
Maybe the books with no sponsored bar are the ones where no-one uses them or the author as a keyword?
Not sure if I should be happy about that, or upset? :icon_think:
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