Amazon Stuff

Judging strictly from the outside, this makes a lot of sense. After all, Microsoft has risen to a multi-billion dollar market cap on the basis of its brilliantly executed ad services … oh, wait, that’s Google.

AMAZON HIRED MICROSOFT AD EXECUTIVE LISA UTZSCHNEIDER TO POWER ONLINE ADS - New York Post
isa Utzschneider, who worked at Microsoft for 10 years, will become senior vice president of national ad sales for Amazon, according to e-mails yesterday announcing her departure…

This is not good news for authors or publishers, who never see a penny from the more efficient operation of the used book market.  The more efficient the used book market, the less demand for new books.

Only solution = legislation along European lines. Fat chance!

Amazon.com–News Release
SEATTLE & VICTORIA, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Aug. 1, 2008–Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that, subject to closing conditions, it has reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world.

I thought I would share with you the results of an analysis I did of my (historically low) efficiency at monetizing my web site via Amazon Associates.

• Google Analytics page views 1/1/2008 - date: 26032
• Associates clicks 1303
• Associates unit sales 14
• conversion rate 0.0107
• Associates referral revenue $10.04
• revenue/month $2.26
• NB after royalties revenue for referred titles 40
• Total imputed revenue (referrals + publisher comp)= 50.04
• Imputed revenue/month $11.29
• imputed $/page view $0.0019
• imputed $/1000 page views $1.9222
• imputed $/click $0.0384
• imputed $/conversion $3.5743
• bandwidth used (GB) 56.259
• GB/month 12.69
• max GB/month 200
• days covered 133
• months 4.433
• Imputed revenue/GB $0.89
• overage charge per GB $1.99
• Cost of High Volume Plans per GB $0.19
• possible ^ in usage w/o incurring additional bandwidth charge 15.76044129
• possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ usage x15 w/o additional BW charge =15 x imputed rev /month = $177.89 /month
• possible ^ imputed revenue by ^ conversion rate x 5 = $889.46

what all this tells me:

* I could increase the usage of my website by a factor of 15.7 before I hit the bandwidth threshold for my account at Pair
* assuming that revenue increased in linear proportion, and that I could improve the conversion rate, I could increase my Associates & Associates-driven revenue into the several hundreds of dollars per month
* increasing usage by x 15 would be hard work, there are other things I could do that would increase revenue more (i.e. publish more or better books)

My website has always been a bit of a mess because I use it as a combined blog and bookstore. It would be better to have a single purpose store. Right now the website is under construction as I experiment with new Amazon Associates widgets.

Link to books by W. Frederick Zimmerman and Pepe Escobar on Amazon.

Amazon.com Recommendations Understand Area Woman Better Than Husband | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

SANDUSKY, OH—Area resident Pamela Meyers was delighted to receive yet another thoughtful CD recommendation from Amazon.com Friday, confirming that the online retail giant has a more thorough, individualized, and nuanced understanding of Meyers’ taste than the man who occasionally claims to love her, husband Dean Meyers.

This puts it Amazon’s much-maligned recommendations feature in its proper context.

Askville Blog

Welcome to the Askville blog. For the vets who have been helping us beta test Askville for the past few months - thank you for all your feedback, suggestions, and input; without your help we wouldn’t be where we are today! For newbies, welcome to the world of Askville and we hope you’ll find it as fun and rewarding as we do. Over the past months the entire Askville team has been working day and night to make Askville a reality. Today, we are excited to open Askville to the general public!

My friend Eileen Quenin is working on this. The interface is pretty slick. Thus far, it’s sort of questionable whether there’s enough of an n to make the answers really compelling.

As an author and publisher with many books on Amazon, I’m wondering why this isn’t linked with AmazonConnect to provide authors and publishers an opportunity to provide highly qualified answers for $$$$.

Technorati Tags: askville, amazon

Amazon.com–News Release

New ”Search Suggestions” Feature Enables Amazon.com Community to Help Customers Find What They’re Looking For SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Aug. 10, 2006–Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN) today announced “Search Suggestions,” a new feature enabling customers, sellers, authors, and other members of the Amazon.com community to help customers find what they’re looking for. Search Suggestions are user-submitted recommendations for connecting a product to specific keywords, as well as an explanation of why the connection is relevant. Once a Search Suggestion is approved, the product along with its relevancy explanation appears in search results the next time a customer searches using those keywords.

Anyone can submit a Search Suggestion directly from the detail page for a product and there is no charge. For example, thanks to a recent Search Suggestion from an Amazon.com customer, the Shakespeare play “Macbeth” now appears when customers search for “The Scottish Play.” The customer’s explanation is shown next to a link to the book: “theater superstition dictates that ‘Macbeth’ is referred to as ‘the Scottish play.’” “Amazon.com is all about helping customers find whatever they are looking to buy online,” said Matt Round, Director of Software Development, Amazon.com. ”

Search Suggestions empower the broad Amazon.com community to help other customers find what they’re looking for. If you’re passionate about a product, help it be discovered — make a Search Suggestion today.”

Businesses that list products on Amazon.com are encouraged to use Search Suggestions to help customers find their products in new ways. Steve Weber, author of “The Home-Based Bookstore,” has already started using Search Suggestions to help Amazon.com customers discover his book. “Since I’m a book author, I immediately thought of a suggestion I could make for my title, ‘The Home-Based Bookstore.’ My suggestion was for Amazon to show my book when shoppers searched for ‘bookselling.’ Since that keyword isn’t in my title, the book did not appear in those search results before,” said Weber.

Technorati Tags: amazon, search suggestions