John Naughton: Amazon gives in over adult content

Opinion

Amazon has an enormous share of online retailing - almost a third of all e-commerce in the US - and with that kind of power comes responsibility, as was illustrated by the firestorm that blew up when they excluded "adult" books from some searches and bestseller lists.

When Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, his single strategic goal was to "get big quick". His hunch was that, in online retailing, size and scale would be the ultimate determinants of success.

And his vision was never limited to books - they were the obvious starting point, because they are goods that people could buy without having to handle them. But Bezos had much more ambitious plans. He wanted to sell everything that could be sold online. He saw Amazon as potentially the Wal-Mart of the web.

Last week we saw two very different illustrations of how close he has come to achieving his goal. Stephen Ju, an analyst at a US investment firm, published his analysis of the scale of Amazon's role in online retailing.

The company's reported revenues consist of a mix of gross revenues from its own businesses plus net third-party commissions. To date, Ju observed, Amazon has not given a breakdown of the two numbers, other than as a percentage of units shipped. So he set out to try to work out the real picture.

What he wanted to know was "how much third-party gross merchandise value is flowing through Amazon's platform - and what slice of all e-commerce Amazon is actually facilitating".

His conclusion is that Amazon may now be "facilitating" close to a third of all e-commerce in the US. And he thinks the company will make further gains in international online retailing.

Ju's conclusion may be the product of sophisticated mathematical analysis, but it won't have surprised anyone who shops online. I've lost track of the number of times when I've googled for something - an item of computing or garden equipment, for example, or a digital camera or an electric hob - only to find that Amazon offers the item in question, often in umpteen varieties.

And usually at pretty competitive prices too. And because I've used Amazon from its inception and have had nothing but excellent customer service, I'm always more likely to buy from it than from a competing online retailer.

So to me, the surprising thing about Ju's analysis is that Amazon doesn't have an even bigger market share than his computations suggest.

With that kind of power comes responsibility, something that was vividly illustrated by a firestorm that blew up last weekend and showed Amazon in an uncharacteristically unfavourable light. It began when a LiveJournal blog by author Mark Probst was picked up in the blogosphere. He had noticed that his book The Filly, though still listed on Amazon's US website, had lost its sales ranking data and was no longer appearing in relevant searches.

Probst then emailed Amazon asking what was going on. He had an email reply - from a named human being, incidentally - saying: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and bestseller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Probst duly posted this reply on his blog. By this time thousands of people had been alerted, and it was rapidly discovered that Amazon's interpretation of "adult" seemed to mean books or DVDs with gay or lesbian themes. That meant they would no longer turn up in searches, or, when found, would no longer include their sales rankings. At which point, the issue exploded into an online firestorm.

Even normally dispassionate commentators were swept up in the moral outrage.

"There is no civil rights struggle in the US that matters more to me," wrote one of them, Clay Shirky, "than the extension of equal rights without regard for sexual orientation. Here was a chance to strike a public blow for that cause, and I didn't even have to write a cheque or get up from my chair to do it!"

Later, Shirky wrote an admirable account of how he - along with thousands of other commentators - had allowed anger to cloud his judgment. What stimulated his change of heart was Amazon's release of an apologetic statement stating that it was an "embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloguing error" that had banned 57,310 listings. "So it's over," wrote Probst, the man whose post triggered the storm.

"Amazon admits they goofed, and I, for one, shall give them the benefit of the doubt and say I do not believe that there was any malicious intent. Case closed."

Until the next time.

- OBSERVER