Reviews or “paid promotional content”? Amazon is paying users to make videos of its products
Reviews or “paid promotional content”? Amazon is paying users to make videos of its products
From side hustles to gig work, plenty of people in this economy are working more than just their 9-to-5s. In fact, 5.1% of people employed hold multiple jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s January jobs report, which is up from 5% in January of 2023.
One way some people are making money on the side is through content creation. And as the digital economy grows, Amazon wants to tap in to content creation by paying its users to make videos reviewing products for its site through its Amazon Influencer Program.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Caroline O’Donovan, reporter for The Washington Post, about these influencers. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: So, this is all a formal, actual Amazon program, right?
Caroline O’Donovan: That’s right. It’s called the Amazon Influencer Program.
Ryssdal: And these people make money when people watch the videos and then go on to buy the product, yes?
O’Donovan: Exactly. So imagine you’re shopping on Amazon, you’re not sure which, I don’t know, coffeemaker you want to get and you’re clicking around, you’re trying to look at the photos. Is it going to fit under my counter overhang? And you end up watching a video. Maybe you thought it was a customer video, or maybe you thought it was the seller. Sometimes it’s these people who get paid a commission to make the video. So, if you watch the video, and you say, “OK, that’s the one I’m going to buy,” and you buy it, someone in Wichita or whatever might make a dollar or three bucks from your purchase.
Ryssdal: I don’t have an entrepreneurial bone in my body, but even I recognize that the incentives here for these reviews to be overwhelmingly positive is the whole kit and caboodle, right? Because if you do a negative review, nobody buys it, and you don’t make any money. You do a positive review, people buy, and you make money, right?
O’Donovan: I think that’s something a lot of these influencers were sort of wrestling with. They don’t want to mislead people. A lot of them have already gone through being part of multilevel-marketing schemes. They didn’t like pushing products on their friends. These are, you know, honorable, nice people who didn’t want to feel like they were tricking people in order to make money. But like you said, if someone sends you a free product and you’re making a video of it, you’re not going to make any money if you say, “Hey, this was garbage.” I talked to one lady who was sent a free hair dryer, and her hair got sucked up into it because the vent was in the handle. She’s OK. She sent the hair dryer back and ended up not making a video of it. But then the company sent her another product to review. So it’s sort of this question of like, well, should you make a negative review of the hair dryer so other people don’t buy it? Or do you just kind of sit it out?
Ryssdal: I imagine you watched a zillion of these things. Did any of them entice you to, on your dime or The Washington Post’s dime, to buy the product?
O’Donovan: The Washington Post is definitely not spending money on Amazon.com on my behalf or anyone else’s behalf. I will say that there was one outdoor reclining lounge chair that might fix a very particular problem that I have that I have been tempted by.
Ryssdal: Wow. All right. Well, there you go. That’s a positive thing. And we should say, we’ll get the disclosure as we did last time, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and in his personal capacity, The Washington Post, so we’ll get that out there. What happens when these people run out of things in their home to review?
O’Donovan: So that’s one of the things that captured my attention at first was some people go to stores, like when they’re doing their grocery shopping, they might scan stuff so that they know that the new things that they’re buying are products that they can review. Or maybe they shop off the Amazon bestseller page. But then, you know, some people really do start to push the bounds of maybe what you would think is an honest review, like booking an Airbnb just so you can review all the items in the Airbnb. I’m saying review, but I think it’s an open question if these are reviews or just paid promotional content.
Ryssdal: Yeah, they’re like product placements. This is just the latest in a string of side hustles that the digital economy is giving us, right? I mean, it’s sort of a natural extension.
O’Donovan: Totally. I mean, a lot of the people doing this also are on websites like Fiverr, making cheap digital content. So it’s definitely part of a broader trend of people doing little bits of online gig work, right, like getting paid very small fees to create little bits of content. And as part of that, Amazon has offered a lot of different ways that they want you to try to make money on their site, whether you’re making deliveries in your own car or in one of their vans or you’re selling stuff. That’s something I’m really interested in is all the different ways Amazon advertises itself as this way you can ride its coattails to access the scale of its platform.
Ryssdal: This is a little flip, but it’s Amazon’s economy, and we’re all just kind of living in it.
O’Donovan: I wouldn’t say that you’re wrong.
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