This content was created by Max Brun. This content was uploaded by Max Brun. This is a YouTube video titled "Marketplace Monetization Using Ads" (created 2023-09-13) containing an interview-style discussion between two speakers about introducing and managing ads in a marketplace, with the interviewee referencing Instacart's approach. The excerpt covers balancing ad monetization with customer experience, the decision to keep organic listings separate from paid placements, building relevance and quality filters for ads, using crowd-sourced judgments (e.g., CrowdFlower) to evaluate relevance, setting content guidelines (family-friendliness), and using ads plus other discovery features (recipes, videos, tutorials) to recreate in-store discovery within a grocery app.
Chapters
One of the topics that kind of comes up here with founders in the community is when it comes to ads is, you know, as far as, you know, introducing that, but kind of balancing the customer experience, right? And not degrading the marketplace experience. So, you know, how did you think about that? You know, maybe when you first kind of introduced ads to Instacart and kind of managed it?
Yeah, I think, you know, we were benefited by the fact that we weren't first to market, right? That obviously Facebook and Google existed, but also Amazon had a meaningful multi-billion dollar ads business well by the time we launched it. And so there was already a customer understanding on ad load and an understanding of sponsored listing as a product. So we felt comfortable with having ads in general, but there were 2 questions that we debated and I think quickly resolved. One is, should we let the organic listings be influenced? By ad spend in any way, or should we make it very explicit what is sponsored versus not? And we made the principal choice to not have organic listings be influenced, right? And then I think, you know, the other thing that's like relatively market, but each company has a different nuance on is like, okay, great. So now we have search results. What ads do we allow on these search results? So you need to build relevance filters and quality filters for the ads, right? and the expectations of the users. And there are some things that we debated. Okay, so somebody searches for Corona or somebody searches for blinds rather, should we have a Corona ad pop up and vice versa? Does that make sense? Does that fit with the user experience? Is that disruptive or additive? And so there were a lot of these things that we debated and, you know, some of them that we solved by just using, you know, CrowdFlower type like We just asked people, like thousands of people, it was like, does this feel relevant to this? And based on that, we came up with relevance and quality scores that we used. Obviously you still need to set some hard guidelines, like notions around family friendliness, et cetera. Like you don't want condoms showing up when you're searching for vegetables or what have you. So things like that. But yeah, I think there is a way to, so we believe that at sounds a bit cliché, but we believe that there's a way for ads to be, you know, net positive, not just neutral, but net positive to the customer experience, which is we serve you something that you weren't thinking of that you actually wanted for your search. And/or like you were discovering a new product in the same category that you wouldn't have purchased otherwise and that you're delighted by now. I think that's a big problem in general that online platforms struggle with versus offline platforms. which is discovery, because the online experience becomes very utilitarian. You go there to buy the things that you want and you know what you want to buy. You browse a little bit, but people, especially on an app for a grocery category, you're not really browsing the same way you are with end caps and you're looking at, you know, little displays and all of these things in the grocery store and you end up often buying more things than you intended to because you're inspired or you discover things in the grocery store. And that's a a relatively difficult thing to replicate in the app digital experience that we've tried to do a bunch of things to do that. But ads are one way to do that as well, as well as more interactive media and the recipes product and videos and tutorials that we're adding in the app where some of the things we do.
