Apple reportedly cut a deal with Amazon to make sure you don’t see advertisements for its competitors’ products on the same page as the iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and its other products.
According to Business Insider, Apple struck a deal with the retailer to ensure that its product pages look a bit cleaner than those of its competitors, simply because they don’t have as many ads.
While you’ll still see competing products in search result pages for Apple products, Amazon is limiting the ads that it puts above, below, and around those results. When you click on a certain product, Amazon also doesn’t show “products related to this item” or products with a “4-star rating or above,” like it does on other competing products.
The lack of ads also isn’t new. While the missing ads made headlines this week for the first time, the lack of ads on Apple’s pages is linked to a 2018 agreement between the two companies where Apple agreed to sell its products on the platform. That 2018 deal also booted unauthorized third-party resellers from the site.
Insider notes that in an email released by by the House Judiciary Committee, Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s former retail chief said: “Apple would need to purchase these placements or compensate Amazon for the lost ad revenue;” however, it's unclear if Apple compensates Amazon for the space.
In a statement Friday to Insider, Apple said the move was to prevent counterfeit items from being advertised alongside legitimate products.
“The 2018 agreement with Amazon ‘sought to address significant counterfeit and safety issues’ on Amazon’s marketplace. Before the deal, Apple sent ‘hundreds of thousands of take-down notices’ to Amazon to reduce counterfeits, and the company conducted test purchases on Amazon that “consistently returned high counterfeit rates,” Apple commented. “The 2018 Agreements significantly reduced the sale of counterfeit and unsafe Apple products on Amazon’s marketplaces and have materially improved customer experience.”
