Amazon reselling other people’s ads now

Peter Kafka reports for the All Things D blog that Amazon cut a deal with San Francisco-based Triggit to sell adverts on other people’s sites. Previously, Amazon was only selling ad slots on their own web properties, such as IMDB.com and Amazon.com. In a nutshell, the online retail giant buys ad inventory from other sites and resells it to marketers at a premium because they are using data on their shoppers and probing visitors to target likely prospects. The author explains:

Amazon uses the detailed data it collects on its customers and visitors to create pools of potential marketing targets. Amazon tells Triggit to hunt down particular Web surfers after they’ve left the site, using tracking “cookies”; once the startup finds them it purchases ad inventory those users are looking at. Amazon uses that ad space to serve up an ad for the marketer it’s working with, and charges them for the impression.

Granted, this isn’t an ad network per se because Amazon is essentially re-selling other people’s inventory. But looking at the big picture, it’s another sign giving away that Amazon is slowly putting the remaining pieces of a puzzle in place in order to create a comprehensive end-to-end ecosystem designed to efficiently monetize users with physical products, digital media content, apps, advertising and devices. After all, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt included Amazon in the “gang of four” for a good reason.