Huldra

if Bethesda had any sense they'd design the next Elder Scrolls so that it has obvious starting points for the sex modder community. "We went as far as the ESRB would let us. You can take it from here, champ"

[turning my chair 90 degrees and moving from my work computer to my personal laptop at 4PM]: time to stop fighting with BAD BUGGY CODE and instead fight with GOOD BUGGY CODE

So, the other day I was browsing the internet for products I had zero intention of buying, as one does, when I scrolled to the bottom of an Amazon product page, and saw this. A livestream of some dude showing off various Amazon products, with a carousel showing all the products. It's basically Twitch meets QVC. I had never seen this before, so naturally I was interested.

It turns out shopping livestreams are A Thing, it's pretty big in China, and now Amazon wants in. Despite the fact that Amazon has had this for years, I've never seen or heard of it until a few days ago. The Amazon Live ecosystem is very twitch-like, with a huge landing page of past streams, influencers, etc. A few minutes of scrolling around and you can find everything from corporate pre-recorded streams to some random lady who was, and I quote, trying to "grow my hair longer with an iguana light." After a few minutes I found a stream that wasn't even a real person, it was just some TikTok-style text-to-speech of ChatGPT corpo-speak over pre-recorded screengrabs, complete with a looping metaverse-style webcam character in the corner.

You can view the Amazon Live "best practices" here, most of which is fairly generic streaming engagement advice. I also found a how-to article, which among other things demonstrates how Amazon lets you "boost" your livestream, with a recommended ad budget of $200. Yes, that's right, not only do you buy your own products from Amazon and stream them in the hopes of scraping off a few bucks from affiliate links, you can pay Amazon even more money to actually show your stream to people. This is, of course, how everything else on amazon works.

You'll notice that the carousel in the screenshot above shows the products that will be shown in the livestream in the future, which means that someone, or something is selecting them ahead of time. At first I thought there was some sort of algorithm involved in the product selection, since the products (everything from a telescope to a SSD in that screenshot alone) seemed pretty random, which is precisely how Amazon's recommendations tend to work.; I imagined some poor hapless side-gig-influencer being told to review a telescope in their apartment. So naturally, I hopped on one of the streams--a Juggalo who happened to be showing some kind of portable projector--and asked. This is where things got weird. He said Amazon will let you stream whatever you want, but he personally couldn't, because he was working for someone else. After a few minutes I found the someone else....

Is this a....furry dragon affiliate networking business? The linked website is a fairly generic affiliate-link-SEO-driven wordpress blog, complete with a contact page where you can pay to have something advertised on a stream. The "DragonBlogger Showcase" watermark lead me to another Amazon Influencer page, and another website, which makes the setup a little more clear: a multi-streamer Twitch channel of about a dozen or so guys, who make money through various affiliate-link-SponCon programs.

Some more browsing of Amazon Live makes me think this arrangement isn't too weird. An Influencer page, almost all of which links to an affliate-link-heavy wordpress blog, and perhaps an Instagram or Twitter with between 16k-300k followers. Most are heavily themed (tech, home, fashion, etc), and have contact pages where you can pay to have them stream your product.

Want a side-gig in 2023? Join a Twitch collective of Juggalo/Furries/Twitch Streamers and spend 90 minutes a day unboxing Telescopes and off-brand beard trimmers.

So, the other day I was browsing the internet for products I had zero intention of buying, as one does, when I scrolled to the bottom of an Amazon product page, and saw this. A livestream of some dude showing off various Amazon products, with a carousel showing all the products. It's basically Twitch meets QVC. I had never seen this before, so naturally I was interested.

It turns out shopping livestreams are A Thing, it's pretty big in China, and now Amazon wants in. Despite the fact that Amazon has had this for years, I've never seen or heard of it until a few days ago. The Amazon Live ecosystem is very twitch-like, with a huge landing page of past streams, influencers, etc. A few minutes of scrolling around and you can find everything from corporate pre-recorded streams to some random lady who was, and I quote, trying to "grow my hair longer with an iguana light." After a few minutes I found a stream that wasn't even a real person, it was just some TikTok-style text-to-speech of ChatGPT corpo-speak over pre-recorded screengrabs, complete with a looping metaverse-style webcam character in the corner.

You can view the Amazon Live "best practices" here, most of which is fairly generic streaming engagement advice. I also found a how-to article, which among other things demonstrates how Amazon lets you "boost" your livestream, with a recommended ad budget of $200. Yes, that's right, not only do you buy your own products from Amazon and stream them in the hopes of scraping off a few bucks from affiliate links, you can pay Amazon even more money to actually show your stream to people. This is, of course, how everything else on amazon works.

You'll notice that the carousel in the screenshot above shows the products that will be shown in the livestream in the future, which means that someone, or something is selecting them ahead of time. At first I thought there was some sort of algorithm involved in the product selection, since the products (everything from a telescope to a SSD in that screenshot alone) seemed pretty random, which is precisely how Amazon's recommendations tend to work.; I imagined some poor hapless side-gig-influencer being told to review a telescope in their apartment. So naturally, I hopped on one of the streams--a Juggalo who happened to be showing some kind of portable projector--and asked. This is where things got weird. He said Amazon will let you stream whatever you want, but he personally couldn't, because he was working for someone else. After a few minutes I found the someone else....