TL;DR: Accept you noticed that there seems to be an increasing number of sponsored products at the top of Amazon's search results? You're not imagining it. The retail giant is showing users upwardly to 6 of these items—information technology used to be two or three—and is charging companies more money to appear in the summit slots.

At that place are a lot of items on Amazon, which is why many sellers are willing to pay for their appurtenances to appear prominently in search results. CNBC reports that instead of the usual two to three sponsored products, users are now more than likely to see five to six. In some cases, online shoppers using the mobile app have to swipe by two screens of results before encountering any unpaid listings.

Non just is Amazon showing more ads, but information technology'southward also charging companies actress for them. According to a survey of more than 300 Amazon sellers conducted past Canopy Management, the price per click for search advertising on Amazon was $1.27 in Baronial. A year ago, it was but 86 cents.

Which sponsored product to choose?

"It's non uncommon now for brands to exist spending 50% or more of their product price on various fees to be selling on Amazon," said Market Pulse's Juozas Kaziukenas.

The winner in all this, of course, is Amazon's bottom line. In its most contempo quarterly report, the "other" sales segment, most of which is advertising, was the company'south fastest-growing in Q2. Acquirement was up 87% year-on-year to over $vii.9 billion.

Two years ago, the formerly anti-advertising Amazon moved ahead of Microsoft to become the 3rd-largest The states ad platform behind Google and Facebook. eMarketer predicts it will control over three-quarters of the $24 billion e-commerce ad market by 2023.

In 2022, Amazon's 5.viii% share of the worldwide ad revenue put it behind Ali Baba'south 8.vii%, with Facebook at 23.7% and Google on top with 28.half-dozen%.

Amazon told CNBC that information technology has no dedicated ad slots within search results, significant users could run into just one ad or even none. Information technology said advertisement is an optional service that helps improve products' visibility.