The Washington Post previously flirted with this idea years ago. I'd be careful jumping to conclusions about Bezos' influence. On The Media did a radio segment on it (and the ethical issues it raises) in 2011: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/170064-web-links-money-maker... (click the stacked lines icon for a transcript). It's worth a listen.
It's one thing to hyperlink words to affiliate links in their text, but it's completely different to force all their readers to read over "Buy it now" while they're trying to read the article. Talk about interrupting the flow of the article!
Also, how would you feel as a journalist if the investigative piece you'd spent the last three weeks on was ultimately riddled with "buy it now"s?
> Also, how would you feel as a journalist if the investigative piece you'd spent the last three weeks on was ultimately riddled with "buy it now"s?
Note that this is in the Style section, and they may draw a line between "serious" reporting and entertainment reporting for the purposes of in-line ads.
I'd like to believe that buy-it-now links are added independently from the editorial process. It's an easy rationalization to start editing articles to make them more commerce-friendly, and it's a great way to wreck quality journalism.
It reminds me of websites that insert live stock quotes into their stories.
- generally the information / buy it now link isn't of interest to readers
- more useful generally would be a link to an internal encyclopaedia page: give the reader more information about the company/book, and include stock quotes / buy it now links on that page
- if it's truly useful enough to include inline in the article, the journalist will put it there manually
- a middle ground would be to pull stock quotes / buy it now links out of the main text into the margin
A much better solution than 'sponsored' articles. Gives journalists the freedom to write freely without upsetting each individual sponsor. Change the buy it now links accordingly, amazon sells nearly everything.
It's funny, I didn't know Amazon acquired WP until earlier today.
I do appreciate these kinds of ads though. All due respect to Google's algorithms, but I'd rather see ads about what I'm reading about. Not something roughly based on my browser history which is usually something I was just looking at and already made a decision on. (Does anyone ever click on Google ads?)
I guess it was just a matter of time. I would have really liked if Bezos actually wanted to have a nice, respectable newspaper without using it as a marketing platform for Amazon.
