Amazon’s Ad Biz Draws Wider Interest; Study Finds Telcos Throttling Some Traffic

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Ad Commerce

Amazon’s ad business is catching the attention of market analysts, The New York Times reports. The company is on pace to capture upward of $9 billion in ad revenue by year end, with help from brands like Geico, Verizon and ABC that don’t actually sell on Amazon, as well as product brands Amazon both works and competes with. “I do hear some brands saying, ‘We don’t want to work with Amazon too much because they’re going to get too much information from us,’” says Will Margaritis, 360i’s VP of ecommerce. “I feel like that’s overthinking it. Amazon has enough data to understand everything about any category it wants to be in.” More.

Choke Hold

So long, net neutrality. US telecom companies have begun throttling internet traffic from streaming giants like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime and NBC Sports, according to a study by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The universities used an app called Wehe to monitor internet traffic to 100,000 consumers. From January to May, the app detected that Verizon treated network traffic differently 11,100 times, while AT&T did so 3,398 times, T-Mobile 3,900 times and Sprint 339 times. Telecom giants say they’re throttling traffic to manage the amount of content people are streaming, but most consumers aren’t aware they’re doing it. “Now that net neutrality has been repealed by the FCC, it is important for consumers and researchers to watch out for ISPs starting to make use of their new ‘freedom’ in that way, and then call ISPs out for it,” says Florian Schaub, a privacy and mobile computing researcher at the University of Michigan tells Bloomberg. More.