More Layoffs Hit News Media; Spotify May Spend Big To Acquire Gimlet

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The New News News industry downsizing continued last week with layoffs at Vice and buyouts at McClatchy, close on the heels of similar painful cuts at BuzzFeed, Verizon Media and Gannett. “We are changing the size of the workforce to align with the revenue,”Continue reading »

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Digiday Research: 30 percent of agency staffers are looking for a new job

Loyalty is hard to come by in the agency world. People who work in marketing and advertising agencies are notorious for bouncing between companies in search of new opportunities and more money. Thirty percent of the 446 agency professionals surveyed by Digiday this January said they were on the hunt for a new job, and another 48 percent said they would be open to opportunities, although they were not actively looking.

Holding companies under pressure

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How dot-com publisher Astrology.com persevered — and is growing

The dot-com boom and bust is long over, but Astrology.com has survived and, in some ways, thrived by focusing on its website and apps, search and email.

The site, which was created in 1999 and is owned by San Francisco-based media company Ingenio, is touting 38 percent year-over-year revenue growth in 2018, up from 10 percent between 2016 to 2017. It’s profitable. Today, Astrology.com’s annual revenue is in the “low eight figures,” with 60 percent coming from programmatic display advertising, 20 percent from ads sold directly, 15 percent from email marketing and 5 percent from premium content sales, according to Josh Jaffe, gm of media for Ingenio.

In December 2018, the site received 2 million unique visitors and 22 million total visits, with visitors on average spending 7.8 minutes on the site, according to Comscore data.

Unlike many modern-day media companies, Astrology.com hasn’t committed to growing distribution via social platforms — or looking to them for ad revenue sharing. The company has accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but they are not where Jaffe said he has focused his team’s efforts. Astrology.com, of course, has the advantage of a strong domain.

“We are [on social], but it’s such a low impact. We think it may be because astrology is something a little more personal. Google is the big means of distribution, second is direct, and third is email,” Jaffe said.

Ingenio, which launched Astrology.com and its sister site Horoscope.com in 1999, has a long history in Silicon Valley. It went from a dot-com startup with many subsidiaries to an acquired company in eight years. AT&T announced in November 2007 it was acquiring Ingenio and integrating its pay-per-call search and directory into its own services like the Yellow Pages. But in May 2013, Ingenio was reestablished as an independent company, as it stands today.

When Jaffe joined Ingenio and took over Astrology.com in 2016, he prioritized improving the websites and five mobile apps they had already created. At that time, the mobile website was not responsive and not updated on a regular basis.

“You have to respect the owners of the business because they did a great job building up a huge audience. On the other hand, it’s almost like these sites had been stuck in a time machine that went back to 1999,” Jaffe said.

Even though Astrology.com’s site is great for direct discovery, the company’s editorial team wasn’t really focused on other search engine optimization tricks. Now, the team of 12 employees at Horoscope.com Inc. (who are all at Ingenio’s headquarters in San Francisco, except one in New York) makes sure there are new articles on the site daily.

Banner ads on the site are powered through an exclusive arrangement with SheKnows Media as well as Taboola. Prior, the company had its own product and engineering team coordinating the ad units.

Beyond the site, email is one of the company’s priorities to grow the audience and make more money. The company said it has more than 4 million email subscribers across 15 different email newsletters. The email newsletters have a 20 percent open rate, on average.

Kerel Cooper, svp, global marketing at email marketing platform LiveIntent, said her company receives more requests from their clients that want to focus on their owned and operated properties, like email newsletters. LiveIntent clients include Expedia, Condé Nast, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Wayfair.

“We are hearing more and more from our clients about the need to focus on their own content channels and how critical it is for them to engage their audience within their own platform and drive revenue from those platforms,” Cooper said.

Looking ahead, Astrology.com’s Jaffe said he plans to further grow revenue through the site’s premium content library, where people pay for personalized readings like a birth chart or a compatibility report. These reports are built by software and then approved by their editorial teams. The company also plans to charge subscription fees or other micro-payments within its mobile apps.

Voice, as in creating specific content for smart speakers like Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, also appeals to Jaffe due to the company’s focus on daily horoscopes and personalization. And they’re also growing video — but not for Facebook, Snapchat or any of the other social networks.

“We don’t have a seven-person Snapchat team here. That’s not our expertise. We’re just trying to win the SEO wars with our video content,” Jaffe said.

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Following layoffs, Vice Media signals an end to its freewheeling days

Vice Media is growing up.

On the heels of cutting 10 percent of its headcount of 2,500 employees, CEO Nancy Dubuc unveiled a reorganization that will streamline Vice around its best-performing business line, jettison far-flung money-losing outposts and cut deeply into “non-core” edit areas like sports and fashion. In short, Vice is looking to go from bad boy to model student as it seeks to build a business that matches the $1.4 billion invested in it. Dubuc, who joined as CEO last March, is signaling a break from the freewheeling, another-round-of-shots approach of Vice co-founder Shane Smith.

“I think most of Vice’s problems are operating acumen problems: coordination, mature process, etc.,” one former executive said. “In the latter parts of Shane’s tenure as CEO, there was not sufficient executive leadership to say, ‘We’re going to do this, and we’re not going to do that.’”

On Friday, Dubuc sent a letter to employees announcing that Vice Media would centralize itself into five separate business units, including studio, TV, digital, news and Virtue, the company’s advertising agency. The restructuring included layoffs of up to 250 employees, 10 percent of a total headcount of roughly 2,500 employees; Vice employs another 500 contributors around the world.

The cuts, which started in the U.S., U.K. and Mexico Friday and will unfold in the coming weeks internationally, will be concentrated in Vice’s digital business, foreign operations and in “non-core” editorial verticals, among other areas, sources familiar with the matter said. A source told Digiday to expect a “bloodbath” in international markets.

The move will allow Vice to invest in core business areas that Dubuc sees as opportunities for growth including its Studios division, which recently sold an Adam Driver-led drama film, “The Report,” to Amazon for $14 million at the Sundance Film Festival; its ad agency, Virtue, which acquired 20 new clients this year; and its News division, which piled up nine Emmy nominations in 2018.

Virtue drives the smallest share of revenue of the five new divisions, a source familiar with the matter said. The Studios division accounts for the most, followed by News and Digital; TV, home to its cable channel, Viceland, ranks fourth out of five.

Regardless of where the growth comes from, Vice needs its revenues to grow. The company has been under intense scrutiny, missing its revenue targets once again in 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which has raised $1.4 billion in venture capital, reportedly generated between $600 million and $650 million in 2018, missing its target by $50 million. This came a year after Vice missed its 2017 revenue target by $100 million.

Vice’s misses led to Disney, which owns a 21 percent stake in Vice, writing down the value of its investment by $157 million.

Over that same stretch, Vice has seen the digital audience on its owned and operated properties drop. Monthly unique visitors to Vice Media dropped 16 percent, year over year, to 66 million, according to Comscore.

Now, significant changes are coming.

On Friday, Vice’s president of digital, Josh Cogswell, sent a memo to employees saying that the digital department was “exploring the right way to further strengthen and support our VICE coverage under a new unified brand architecture.” The memo promised further changes, as well as investment and staffing against them.

Vice Media’s clean-up will be especially crucial in its global operations. Under Smith, who served as CEO until last spring, business leaders in Vice’s foreign offices were given a green light to sell without consulting much with the teams that were supposed to deliver on those campaigns, one source familiar with the matter said.

That enabled each foreign operation to grow organically and on its own terms. But it also created fiefdoms, whose different levels of development sometimes made it hard for Vice to fulfill global campaigns, sources said. Centralizing the business divisions should help clean those problems up.

In some ways, the reorganization announced today has been long overdue. In some ways, the company, which made a name for itself with its brash sensibility and edgy ethos, is growing up. It used to bring its brash sensibility into sales meetings, a tactic that Vice has moved away from a bit since Dubuc, former CEO of A+E Networks, replaced Smith as Vice’s chief executive, multiple agency sources said.

“They used to come to in and say, ‘If you don’t like this, fuck you, we’ll give it to someone else,” said one agency source, who added that while the company still leads its meetings with discussions around custom content, it has grown more accommodating lately.

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Seeking clarity: How Unilever tackles cross-platform measurement

Unilever has found a way to measure ad data across Google, Facebook and Twitter in a way that doesn’t involve taking that data directly from the walled gardens.

Instead, the data will go to neutral parties in the form of Kantar and Nielsen. Both measurement firms will process and anonymize streams of data to show where money is being wasted on ads on Google, Facebook and Twitter that are repeatedly sent to the same person. Unilever will then take that information from the measurement firms, but at no point will it pull any of the raw data directly from the platforms, said svp of global media Luis di Como.

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‘A crisis boiling under the surface’: Agencies confront employee burnout

Within VaynerMedia’s New York Hudson Yards office is a quiet space meant to be a meditation room for agency employees to relax, filled with adult coloring books, a salt lamp and a chair.

For at least one agency staffer, it has become a safe space for panic attacks and crying sessions, known among her and some of her peers as the “cry closet.”

They happen when things get too tough at work. “Being at work exacerbated my problems because it made me face the fact that I felt very unfulfilled in my job because I felt that I was very bad at it.”

This staffer is not the only one. When it comes to issues of burning out at work and mental health, agency staffers are reporting high levels of burnout and being worried about their mental health. For some, it’s linked to the very nature of the agency industry itself — hectic and relentless, dependent upon client whims and, these days, fraught with layoffs and other uncertainty.

In research conducted by Digiday+, 32 percent of agency professionals reported being worried about their mental health, and it doesn’t matter what kind of agency, whether media or creative. This was across both media and creative agencies. This is about in line with national statistics: Mental Health America found that about 35 percent of employees in the U.S. have workplace stress that they say affects their lives. Burnout is a hot topic: A recent article examined how errand paralysis, stress and the idea that you should simply be working all the time have contributed to millennials as the burnout generation.

The Digiday survey, done of 446 agency professionals early in 2019, points to a correlation between mental health and the number of hours agency professionals are working a week. About 40 percent of people who work between 50 and 59 hours a week said they were worried about their mental health, compared to 27 percent of those surveyed who work between 40 and 49 hours a week who said they were worried. 

Maddie Marney became a freelancer last year after eight years of working at media and creative agencies, often putting in 80-hour work weeks. Feeling burned out was a big reason.

“I could never make plans. You never knew if there was something during the day that would prevent me from going to a dinner or happy hour,” she said. “There were some days I would leave the office at 7:30 p.m., only to go home and log back on.”

Stephanie Nadi Olsen, founder of Atlanta-based freelance organization We Are Rosie, now nine months old, said that around 900 members of the organization’s 1,100 freelancers left the agency world because they were overworked, underpaid or physically exhausted. Some people, she said, have left the country and are freelancing abroad, feeling like they couldn’t get out of that cycle without a dramatic, clean break.

“For people who are perfectionists or type A, or people who are just don’t want to be viewed as failures, it can create this psychological trauma,” she said. “They feel like, in order to be successful in this environment, I have to be unhealthy, emotionally worn out and exhausted. Not every agency is morally bankrupt, but a lot of them are.”

There is also a connection between salary and mental health — and, therefore, junior staffers are reporting higher levels of mental health problems. Of those surveyed, 41 percent of those making less than $50,000 a year said they were worried about their mental health, while only 28 percent of those who make $100,000 or more said they are worried about their mental health.

Ad agencies are people businesses. Big accounts mean more work; there are often tight and sometimes unreasonable deadlines. Margins are squeezed, and salaries, especially for those starting out, can be low. Turnover is high. At some agencies, that kind of cyclical burnout is built into the way things work: According to one vp at a social media agency, their agency will bring people on, work them 60 to 70 hours a week and then, when they leave for better opportunities, repeat the entire process over again.

‘Unspoken, urgent issue’
Dealing with burnout and mental health issues is still something not talked about freely at agencies. In a culture that is obsessed with creativity and driving success, it can be difficult to admit a problem.

Stephanie Redlener, founder of culture consultancy Lioness, works with ad agencies like DDG and Havas and companies like MetLife and IBM to develop their work culture and strategies to maintain talent. She calls the issue a “silent epidemic.” “It’s an unspoken, urgent issue,” she said. “People are ashamed to talk about it.” The issue, she said, hurts an industry already struggling to recruit and keep talent.

For people with predisposed mental illnesses, the industry’s harshness can make things worse. Aaron Harvey, owner at creative shop Ready Set Rocket, said his stressful work environment and long hours are exacerbated by obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he has struggled with since he was 10. In the mornings, he was pitching CEOs on creative campaigns, but by night, he would be drinking heavily, doing drugs and causing himself self-harm. One day, he found himself starring in the mirror as he held a butcher knife to his throat.

“It’s a crisis boiling under the surface,” said Harvey, who has, since his suicide attempt, has undergone treatment and has launched his own nonprofit Made of Millions to help people with mental illnesses. “When you put people in a pressure cooker, you’re going to have people boil over.”

Fixing the issue at agencies is not easy. Governing bodies like the 4A’s host training workshops for managers, distribute materials that talk up wellness and offer accreditation to those doing a good job. But there’s only so much they can do. Agencies have added things like nap rooms.  Some agency professionals say governing bodies should mandate hours worked or a way to compensate overtime hours despite salaries. “Mandating hours is really difficult especially in our industry because it is driven by clients,” said Simon Fenwick, 4A’s evp of talent, engagement and inclusion.

One thing is for sure: Meditation rooms and ping-pong tables are not going to cut it anymore

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Building up its retail media operation to compete with Amazon, Wayfair launches sponsored products

Online furniture retailer Wayfair is opening up sponsored products to all, the latest in the company’s attempt to build out its advertising platform. The company is also now hiring for a director of product management for media.

The platform, called Wayfair Media Solutions, has existed for a couple of years. But the launch of sponsored products means a new way for Wayfair to compete with other marketplaces like Amazon. According to a document explaining sponsored products, brands can bid to promote certain SKUs within certain categories. The pay-for-performance set up means they play for clicks. The tool is self-service. It went into beta in September and is now available to everyone.

The job posting gives some indication of how the brand is thinking about growth in the space. The brand says it is “aggressively” investing in its “media” space, which includes onsite advertising, sponsored products, custom sponsorships and brand sponsorships.

Wayfair’s approach is unique, according to ad buyers, because it’s building much of its technology in-house. The company has 1,300 engineers and data scientists. Most of its advertising technology, including campaign management and bidding algorithms for online advertising, was developed in house. Two buyers said sponsored products CPMs are between $3 and $4. 

Wayfair did not respond to a request for comment.

Like Amazon, Wayfair classifies media revenue under “other” categories in its financial reporting. That revenue was $13 million in the third quarter of 2018 and $42 million in the year to date last year.

One buyer, who is currently working with a brand to buy ads on Wayfair, said that while Wayfair’s scale remains much smaller than Amazon, Wayfair’s similar ability to connect advertising with intent with actual sales is attractive. Wayfair’s also managed to crack one area Amazon hasn’t quite entirely swallowed: furniture. That makes it more attractive to brands in that area.

“The impact Wayfair has had on the industry as a retailer is important,” said Will Margaritis, who heads e-commerce at Dentsu Aegis. “Amazon has always struggled with the home. Wayfair found this niche in which no one could do well online.”

In a media kit, Wayfair says it has more than 39 million monthly unique visitors across its brands, with 68 percent female users, and 31 percent of them making more than $85,000 in household income.

Offerings within media solutions include the new sponsored products, as well as personalized brand pages and display. Like Amazon, it also includes an offering that follows customers with targeted ads off Wayfair.com.

Wayfair’s experience with growing its ad platform seems to be very closely mirroring Amazon. In an earnings call last quarter, CEO Niraj Shah said that the return on ad spend for the supplier in the beta test had been high. Still, he said, it’s important as retail to not have it negatively impact customer experience — a consistent balancing act for retail media operations that don’t want to overstuff search results with advertising when users come in to make a purchase. Advertising can be lucrative, with high margins, noted Shah, but it can also ruin the experience.

“The reality is we think [sponsored products] will take a little while to ramp up,” said Shah. “So we obviously – there’s volume there and it grows, but the volume starts relatively small, and I think the real economics for everyone involved get good as it ramps and so we’re in a ramp phase, but I don’t think of the ramp as not in a quarter, but as many quarters. And as it plays out through next year and forward, I think we’ll start seeing it be a meaningful contributor.”

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Walmart is using a Flipkart fashion brand to test expansion in Canada

Walmart is looking to get more out of its Flipkart acquisition by featuring Indian brands in its global e-commerce stores.

Last week, the retailer began offering products from Flipkart-owned Indian fashion brand Myntra on its Canadian e-commerce site. It’s the latest in a series of initiatives to grow the reach of Flipkart, the Indian online marketplace that Walmart acquired last May for $16 billion.

Walmart, like Amazon, is facing challenges scaling in India. E-commerce rules that came into effect Friday bar foreign retailers from selling through local vendors in which they have an equity stake; as a result, thousands of products were removed from Amazon’s site. Flipkart, which sells many private-label brands, will be affected by the rules too, which prohibit one vendor’s retail sales from accounting for more than 25 percent of the overall sales of one marketplace by value in a fiscal year.

Since Walmart acquired Flipkart, the retailer has sought to restructure operations and integrate Flipkart’s technology to gain an edge in the Indian market. In October, it began rolling out Myntra private-label brands in Canadian Walmart stores. Walmart’s moves to scale Flipkart private-label brands offer another distribution channel given restrictions in India. Reaching out to the South Asian diaspora community in Canada is also a way for Walmart to test how Flipkart products will perform in other markets.

“They’re going to have to find ways of monetizing the Flipkart acquisition, and it shows their investors that they’re trying to leverage this new asset,” said Bruce Winder, co-founder of Toronto-based Retail Advisors Network. “Maybe Myntra is the beachhead, and then they may invite other [Indian] sellers to drive more volume.”

Myntra was established as an independent fashion e-commerce retailer based in Bengaluru, India, in 2007. It was acquired in 2014 by Flipkart for $280 million; it focuses on clothing, shoes and accessories. It has 14 private-label brands, and reportedly has aspirations to use Walmart’s e-commerce platform to become a global brand within a couple of years.

“India has great retailers and brands which can work in Canada and the U.S.; I don’t know if Walmart acquired Flipkart for that reason, but it’s definitely something they may want to do long term,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. 

Amar Singh, senior analyst at Kantar Consulting, said the online offering makes the placement of Myntra products in Walmart stores more efficient, enabling in-store pickup of online orders. Since South Asian-origin Canadian populations tend to cluster around urban centers that are well served by Walmart’s physical store infrastructure, it’s a good strategic move for the retailer, he said.

“It’s a point of differentiation for Walmart compared to Amazon because they can concentrate on certain demographics — they can use the stores in Canada to target multiple ethnicities, like, for, example, the South Asian community in the greater Toronto area,” he said.

Acquisitions like Flipkart play to Walmart’s global ambitions, allowing it to use physical stores as distribution points to power inventory diversification plans, boosting its competitive position versus Amazon and eBay.

“[Myntra] could be a testing ground for more global infrastructure for e-commerce,” said eMarketer e-commerce and retail analyst Andrew Lipsman. “As Walmart makes more of a global play, cross-border commerce and global logistics are going to be an area of opportunity for them longer-term.”

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‘It’s definitely going to break things’: Apple is prepping an iOS change that may hurt AR and VR advertising

Advertising agency employees who work on augmented reality and virtual reality are worried that Apple is about to upend web-based AR and VR.

Apple appears poised to make it more difficult for sites to track iPhones’ and iPads’ motions and orientations in order to power web-based AR and VR experiences. According to a document published to Apple’s developer site, the next update to Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 12.2, will add a setting that will enable people using its mobile Safari browser to prevent sites from being able to access a device’s accelerometer and gyroscope in order to track the device’s motion and orientation.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment. Tweets from two people whose Twitter bios list them as Apple employees who work on Safari indicate that sites accessed through the mobile version of Safari will need people’s permission before they can track an iOS device’s motion and orientation.

Apple’s change will not completely prevent people from using web-based AR and VR experiences. But by requiring people to enable the setting for an AR or VR experience to work, it will introduce an extra step that could put up enough of a roadblock, especially for ads that incorporate AR, VR or 360-degree video where a person would be less incentivized to enable the setting.

“I’m sort of freaked out,” said Christopher Lepkowski, technical director at Pretty Big Monster, a digital agency that has worked on web-based AR and VR experiences for brands such as Sony Pictures.

It’s unclear whether Apple will introduce a way for sites to prompt people to enable motion and orientation tracking without people having to exit the browser, similar to how sites can request permission to track people’s location.

Apple appears to be disabling sites’ abilities to track iPhones’ and iPads’ movements and orientations to address privacy concerns brought to light last year. In October 2018, Wired reported that thousands of top sites are able to track this information without first receiving people’s permission.

Asking people to exit the browser to toggle on motion and orientation detection would not only make it less likely that people will do so to try out a web-based AR or VR experience, but it may make it less likely that brands invest in producing AR and VR experiences to be distributed online where they’re likely to reach more people than if they could only be accessed through a VR headset or required people to download a mobile app. “It will have a chilling effect on selling this stuff,” said Lepkowski.

Apple’s change will affect existing experiences that use iOS devices’ accelerometers and gyroscopes. For example, Samsung’s “Samsung Within” web-based interactive experience, developed by R/GA to promote the hardware brand’s legacy and its Galaxy Note 9 phone, uses the accelerometer to let people explore the night sky. “It’s definitely going to break things,” said Kai Tier, executive technology director at R/GA. Sites that are responsively designed to reorient themselves when people rotate a phone from portrait to landscape mode will also be affected, though it’s unclear how often people hold their phones horizontally when visiting sites and whether the change would affect videos from being viewed horizontally.

Other web-based branded experiences that would be affected by Apple’s change include AR experiences that Sony Pictures rolled out for “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and DreamWorks and Universal Pictures rolled out for “First Man” as well as a VR experience that DreamWorks TV rolled out for “She-Ra.”

Still, web-based AR or VR experiences aren’t exactly all that popular right now. “I would say the main spend at the moment for AR experiences are on platforms like Snapchat, which are apps, mainly because that’s where people are already engaging, so there’s a built-in user base,” said Tier. While brands are able to incorporate AR or VR experiences into rich-media display ads to help grab people’s attention by having the ads move as a phone moves, “I don’t think at this point that’s something people are necessarily gravitating towards,” he said.

Nonetheless, Apple’s move could reduce the likelihood that brands would eventually gravitate toward those types of ads or web-based AR and VR experiences. That could more broadly impact brands’ interest in VR given that web-based VR can help brands to tackle VR’s scale dilemma.

“Web-based AR/VR experiences address the major barrier to adoption: form factor. As consumers spend more time on mobile devices, serving an immersive, interactive experience without having to put on goggles presents a significant creative opportunity,” said W. Joe DeMiero, management director of digital at Team One, in an email.

As much as Apple’s update may break existing AR and VR experiences and affect new ones, there are workarounds. For example, sites can detect when people are using mobile Safari and display a message asking them to enable the motion and orientation settings. Or they can take advantage of the fact that the desktop version of these experiences do not incorporate the accelerometer or gyroscope (because computers don’t have those sensors) and adapt them to mobile so that people can navigate by swiping their fingers on the screen instead of moving their iPhone or iPad around.

“Because we currently do have versions that don’t rely on the accelerometer, it isn’t a huge effort to change which experience the user is served. But any update does require us to do testing and then go through the whole deployment process,” said Tier.

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Retail Briefing: Amazon is tightening control on pricing for third-party sellers

Amazon’s third-party marketplace is proving to be a more attractive proposition for brands than selling wholesale. The marketplace, which uses Amazon’s own platform and services like Fulfilled By Amazon Shipping, is bringing in more revenue and outpacing the growth of first-party sales. Amazon is chasing the action, offering more resources to sellers and investing in their growth.

Of course, there’s a catch.

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