The death pivot: when the customer becomes the victim
Amazon’s first quarter results reveal something particularly worrying for its regular customers: the e-commerce giant, which for many years strove to offer the widest possible range of products and the best shopping experience, has reversed the fall of previous quarters with growth, albeit limited, but does so on the basis of its cloud computing and advertising divisions, notably the latter.
The problem is that the more money the company makes from advertising, the worse the shopping experience is. The company is about to make the death pivot: when a company goes from trying to satisfy its former customers to seeing them merely as raw material to sell to advertisers, who now become its most important clients.
Understanding the problem, that Cory Doctorow defines as the “enshittification” of the platforms, is simple: a customer who enters Amazon makes purchases that are usually relatively small in amount, and it is the aggregation of many customers shopping on Amazon that ends up making up a significant amount. It’s the philosophy it was founded on: if I sell a lot and work hard to try to provide the best shopping experience, I’m sure I’ll do well. But it has now realized that instead, what it can do is manage those customers, shepherding them toward the advertisers that pay the most. Given that the amount paid by advertisers…
