Stupidity on Amazon's Part

Amazon is placing GoogleAds on blogs to advertise their books and materials. Politiburo Diktat is detailing how this an amazingly stupid and counterproductive move by Amazon.com. It is pissing off their frontline allies, funding their major competitor and costing more money for them. Usually you have to be a Republican to be that oblivious to the implications of a policy. Let me back up a bit though and give you the relevant chunk of his story:

Amazon only pays us, the referring websites, when a visitor actually buys a book. A visitor to my site, sees the Amazon link, clicks over there, (hopefully) buys a book, and “KA-CHING!” …

Google Ads launched, and paid us website owners for clicks. Wow! All a visitor had to do was click the ad, no purchase necessary, and we got a little something....

Over time Google had become more and more lucrative for website owners, and as I have updated and added pages over time, I have gradually allocated more and more shelf space to GoogleAds. If Amazon had paid me something, anything “per click,” in addition to its “per sale” payment, then their program would have been more lucrative to me, and I would have preserved their shelf space....

Amazon is going to pay GoogleAds just to have my visitors click on Amazon.com (and I’ll get my cut from Google). Amazon won’t pay me directly for that, but they WILL pay Google! Ridiculous.

Wow, this is amazing on how stupid it is unless Amazon knows that it has a massive level of incompetency or legal blockage from doing micropayments to the sites that they already have a relationship with.

I mainly find this story interesting as my job this afternoon is to get the Google Ads working for this site. After reading this, and hearing numerous other stories, I am glad that I'll be working with Google on this one, as they at least seem to be coherent.