![]() ![]() The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. That's when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon's shareholders. This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. That tempted in lots of business customers – Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the "everything store" it had promised from the beginning. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don't search anywhere else. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year's worth of shipping. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we'd have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon's customers. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading. ![]() Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.Tiktok's enshittification: The company manually allocates surplus to creators, and they can take it away again, too.Most of the pieces were introduced with the first Parker Brothers iteration of the game in 1935, and the Scottie dog and wheelbarrow were added in the early 1950s. The eight tokens are a race car, Scottie dog, shoe, thimble, top hat, wheelbarrow, battleship and - now - cat. The game is based on the streets of Atlantic City, N.J., and has sold more than 275?million units worldwide. Monopoly’s iconic tokens originated when the niece of game creator Charles Darrow suggested using charms from her charm bracelet for tokens. The initiative was intended to ensure that a game created almost eight decades ago remains relevant to fans. The online contest to change the tokens was sparked by chatter on Facebook, where Monopoly has more than 10 million fans. “I think there were a lot of cat lovers in the world who reached out and voted for the cat to be the new token for Monopoly,” said Jonathan Berkowitz, vice president for Hasbro game marketing. ![]() Other pieces that competed for a spot on Monopoly included a robot, diamond ring, helicopter and guitar. The pieces identify the players and have changed quite a bit since Parker Brothers bought the game from its original designer in 1935. The vote on Facebook closed just before midnight Tuesday, marking the first time that fans had had a say on which token to add and which to toss. The shoe, wheelbarrow and iron were neck and neck in the final hours of voting. The Scottie dog has a new nemesis in Monopoly, with fans voting in an online contest to add a cat token to the property-trading game and drop the iron, toy-maker Hasbro announced yesterday.
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