Look: Amazon is a huge site, so you’ll be forgiven if you haven’t scoured every square inch of it. Most of us fire it up, see the deals of the day on the front page, and decide if we’re interested or not.
But if you’re a cheapskate like me, you’ll be happy to know that there are a handful of Amazon sections that specialize in deals but that aren’t always super obvious.
Here are direct links to six places on Amazon to check for under-the-radar deals.
Just for Prime
If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber, there’s a revolving collection of about 50 or so items that feature exclusive pricing just for members.
Head to Amazon.com/JustForPrime and you’ll notice a carousel in the “Best-selling member deals” where all the deals can be found. Check back here often, as the savings tend to be pretty substantial.
Amazon Outlet
Like any retailer, Amazon sometimes overbuys and needs to blow out existing inventory to make room for other stuff.
Those items that have worn out their welcome can be found in the Amazon Outlet section. There’s plenty here to sift through and the savings range from meager to mouthwatering, so set aside time to do some digging.
Amazon Warehouse
The Amazon Warehouse page is kind of the equivalent of the scratch-n-dent section of a furniture store, but with several categories of products.
It’s not a total free-for-all: You’ll find mainly gadgets, appliances, tools, and home goods, and items range from open-box but unused to pre-owned and used.
Right above the “Add to Cart” button for each product, you’ll find info about what kind of shape it’s in, so make sure to double check there before you commit to purchasing.
Amazon Renewed
There’s bigger risk and bigger rewards in the Amazon Renewed deals section, which features particularly deep discounts on a selection of used products that have been brought back to something resembling like-new condition.
Selection is hit or miss—there are only 22 products available at the time I’m writing this—but you can find some pretty stellar bargains if you get lucky. Amazon also sweetens things by offering 90-day returns on these items as well. And if you don’t find anything tempting, check out the broader Amazon Renewed page, where the discounts might not be as big, but everything’s cheaper than buying new.
Amazon Coupons
No scissors are necessary for the Amazon Coupon section, which serves up a plentiful array of savings across several product categories.
Coupons are searchable by manufacturer and popular coupons are surfaced to the top of the page so you can see what everyone else finds deal-worthy.
Woot.com
Brought online in 2004 and acquired by Amazon in 2010, Woot.com specializes in serving up a handful of deeply-discounted, one-day-only sales. Even if you don’t buy anything, stick around for the tongue-in-cheek product descriptions and other nice little touches like referring to list prices as “pointless” when pitching you how much you’ll actually save.
The deals are real, though. Hot items sell out quickly and Prime members get free shipping. This is a good site to check first thing in the morning to see what’s cooking.
Add ESPN to the list of major websites that are less than thrilled with reader discussions. The sports broadcaster has confirmed to Deadspin that it has dropped its Facebook-linked comment sections across its websites, with no plans to bring them back or archive the results. There are “more touchpoints than ever” for fans to share their opinions, a spokesperson said, and ESPN is creating social media material that “embraces these conversations.” Not that many readers will necessarily mind.
There have been some positive stories to share from the comments, to be clear — we’ve seen an instance of a couple getting married after finding each other in ESPN’s discussions. However, there’s little doubt that many of the comments were less than constructive, including rants that had precious little to do with, well, sports.
ESPN certainly isn’t the first big site to make this move. Popular Science closed its section down in 2013 after expressing concern that it could not only trigger flame wars, but skew people’s interpretation of the articles themselves. It’s hard to blame ESPN for following the trend, especially now that Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are more prominent than they were a few years ago. This could keep readers focused more on the articles themselves while still offering an avenue for those who really, really want to offer their two cents.
(January 24, 2018), The Huffington Post announced it would discontinue its Contributors Platform, launched in 2005.
The platform, which hosted more than 100,000 bloggers during its lifespan, predated social-media platforms like Twitter and Tumblr and offered an outlet for unknown writers to make their voices heard.
In a post on the site, HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen stated: “In a time before the ubiquity of social media, the HuffPost platform was a public square where Americans of all walks of life could have a voice on matters both political and personal.”
However, this also meant the content had a reputation of being unreliable in quality and accuracy. And the publication’s new strategy seems to be an antidote to that.
Two new sections replace the Contributors Platform, HuffPost Opinion and HuffPost Personal.
The Opinion section hosts regular columnists and guest writers handpicked by Huffington Post editors. According to the post, the columnists’ bylines will appear “across the site, so that you will come to recognize a set of smart, reliable voices you can come back to again and again.”
HuffPostPersonal
offers a variety of content, including essays written by guest writers and features, Q&As and interviews by HuffPost reporters. Topics the editors hope to cover include identity, relationships, family and “stories about unique life experiences.”
The Huffington Post
is no stranger to great journalism. The site won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for its series on wounded veterans and their families. By tightening its contributor network, the publication could be indicating they’re making room for quality over quantity.
Over the past few years, outlets have begun to see a positive revenue stream in subscription services. Look at The New York Times or The Washington Post. Slate has recorded great results from its membership service. The Huffington Post’s latest move could be a step in that same direction.
According to Joe Lazauskas, head of content strategy at Contently and author of the upcoming book “The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming into the Void and Make People Love You,” media brands that understand the importance of connecting with their audience become the most successful.
“[The HuffPost’s announcement] is a signal they get the message that it isn’t about putting out as much content as possible, but about focusing on high-quality stories,” Lazauskas tells Publishing Insider. When a brand focuses on quality, they’re saying, ” ‘You know when you read us, it’ll be good.’ Rather than pivoting to video or interactive as so many outlets are doing, the key it to pivot to audiences.”
The site hasn’t mentioned a move toward a paid subscription service, however, as Lazauskas notes, there’s a lot of hunger for liberal news and reporting right now. “If they’re able to put together an offering that’s worth paying for, that’s obviously a great revenue stream,” he says.
With the arbitrary nature of digital advertising and search traffic left to the whims of giants like Google, a move to a reader-based system could prove profitable and beneficial to good journalism.
Facebook’s Instant Articles format is supposed to be a better, faster version of the web’s standard article page. Now it’s adding what has become, for better or worse, a hallmark of digital publishing’s current state: ads within below-the-fold “recommended articles” boxes.
On Thursday, Facebook announced that all Instant Articles publishers can feature ads within the “Related Articles” section appearing below their actual articles. Facebook had started to test these ads in March 2017 and had seen that they generate an “incremental increase” in the amount of money publishers can make per thousand page views, according to a company blog post published on Thursday.
Facebook describes these ads as “native” ads, even though they’re really not. Here’s an example that Facebook included in today’s blog post:
The ads appear to be the same photo-and-link ads that typically appear in people’s Facebook feeds, but now they’re placed among a feed of article links. In fact, to feature an ad inside an Instant Article’s “Related Articles” section, a publisher must be part of Facebook’s Audience Network that Facebook uses to syndicate its news feed ads across an ad network of third-party sites and apps. And when publishers configure their Instant Articles to feature these ads, they are instructed to select “Banner” as the format.
There are no requirements that an ad link to a piece of branded content, a Facebook spokesperson. The only requirement is that ads link to a landing page, which appears to mean any URL. And the ads are limited to photo-and-link formats, so no native videos that play inline.
Advertisers buying Instant Articles inventory from Facebook cannot control whether their ads appear within the “Related Articles” section or not, though they can choose whether to run ads in Instant Articles or not and can block specific publishers or categories of content from featuring their ads.
Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.
Continuing to court small businesses, Facebook is adding new Page sections, including one that will help service providers show off a list of their offerings.
“The services section on Pages … allows service businesses, such as plumbers and spas, to showcase a list of their offerings on their Page,” a Facebook spokeswoman said on Wednesday.
“It makes it easier for people to find the information they are looking for and decide whether to work with the business,” she added.
The new section is now available to all professional services’ Pages, and should be available to all Pages in the coming weeks.
Facebook is also rolling out a new shop section, which provides businesses with another way to display products they are selling on their Page, and allows consumers to more easily discover, browse and make offers to purchase products through messaging.
The shop section feature is currently available to all Pages in Southeast Asia and other high growth and emerging markets, and should expand to other markets shortly.
In recent months, Facebook has made clear its ambitions as a business directory.
Positioning itself directly against Yelp, Angie’s List, and similar services, the social giant recently launched a site that endeavors to connect consumers with “local businesses and organizations with the best Facebook reviews and ratings.”
Dubbed Services, the site is actually an extension of Facebook’s flagship property, featuring a slew or professional services from plumbers to automotive to childcare.
Service suggestions are geo-targeted to users’ locations, and feature customer reviews, a star-based rating system, and general business information.
Late last year, Facebook quietly relaunched its Places Directory, which is essentially a local search engine. Users can use the directory find a “place” by location or another place name.
More recently, Facebook expanded its Notification system to include recommendations for nearby places to eat, movies playing in your area and local events.
Facebook also added new ways for customers to send private messages to Page owners, along with new tools for Page administrators to manage and respond to messages. With a new “Send Message” call-to-action button, for example, users can initiate private conversations with business Pages from News Feed ads.
Facebook also recently announced plans to position Messenger at the center of business-to-consumer communication.
The idea of monetizing comment sections by asking readers to pay to contribute or promote their comments might sound like a good idea.
Michael Robertson, who founded MP3.com in the ’90s and, more recently, the comment management platform SolidOpinion, posits that such a move could solve two problems at once. Charging readers to leave a comment would introduce a new revenue stream for digital publishers as well as tackle one of the Internet’s most-longstanding problems: trolls.
Last month, Tribune Publishing, the country’s third-biggest publisher and owner of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, began using SolidOpinion’s software on the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s website, as a replacement for its previous comment system operated by Facebook. SolidOpinion’s software is free for publishers to install and use, but it splits revenues from comments with publishers.
To understand how paid comments might work, let’s go back a little further.
The comment box is almost as old as online news. In its infancy, the remote connectivity of the Internet allowed strangers to click and communicate over common topics in the form of bulletin boards, forums, and chat boxes. When digital news publishers launched, such formats were integrated so users had a place to discuss the articles they read.
Now, despite sophisticated technical upgrades to Internet infrastructure and digital media more generally, this arrangement has remained mostly untouched. But the relationship between news publishers and the people commenting is increasingly fraught thanks to the unfortunate tendency of some people to do and say terrible things when behind a screen. Like their fairy-tale namesakes, online trolls lurk below the bridge, spewing their vitriol to anyone who happens to scroll too far. Their messages are often rude, hyperbolic, misogynistic, bigoted, lacking in intellectual panache, and devoid of real linguistic sense.
Struggling under the pressure to moderate comments—and sometimes the need to address libelous remarks—many news sites therefore decided that scrapping comment sections altogether was the best answer. In fact, at the end of 2014, it looked like the halcyon days of commenting were done. Within days of each other, The Week, Reuters, Re/code, Mic, and various others shut down the space below the line in favor of readers using social media. A few months later the Guardian’s “Comment Is Free” section banned remarks on “controversial” topics—race, religion, immigration—on the basis they wanted no part in enabling “toxic commentary.”
The challenges here are manifold. Removing comment sections shutters a potential community, off-loads conversation and traffic onto social media in a way that fractures discourse rather than collates it around a central news piece, and conveys a lack of interest in their readers. “Improving comments does not mean censorship or eliminating criticism,” the Guardian editors wrote, even though regular commenters (including the trolls) will inevitably argue that it does.
Viewed in this light, an alternative market solution to trolling that allows the comment system to retain its original purpose seems like a good idea.
Under Robertson’s modular comment system, anyone can still leave a comment for free, but publishers have the option to charge readers to promote some of those comments to the top of the comments section. In each section, up to three promoted comments are shown. Readers can also buy top slots using points they get for positive interaction with the website, such as creating an account, making comments, or getting likes. They can also purchase points. The San Diego Union-Tribune‘s website, which charges 15 points for a promoted comment, sells 88 points for one dollar.
The SolidOpinion comment section on a Tribune article. The “Promote” button is in the lower left corner.
The Tribune also pays for online moderators, and says it was tempted by the idea of off-loading that cost to people who leave the comments. But money aside, the main goal, Tom Mallory, the paper’s online news director, told Bloomberg was “to stamp out troll-ism.”
But would promoted or paid-for comments really address the problem? Not only does it seem naïve to believe so, but asking readers to pay to be part of a conversation comes with its own issues. Not least of which is that it puts a price on the speech of readers and critics.
SolidOpinion’s software could therefore be setting a dangerous precedent. Giving those with a disposable income greater control over digital real estate could alienate young voices, minority voices, and the voices of the disadvantaged. And it wouldn’t alone prevent vitriol or harassment. Nor would it stop the armies of paid commenters who already swarm the web on the behalf of political or corporate interests. Instead of fostering quality conversation, monetized comment sections may simply become havens for irremovable hate speech or ads, thinly veiled or not. Future comment sections could become a lively space for native advertising campaigns rather than thoughtful dialogue. The editors of the online magazine Tablet may be thankful for a reduced number of commenters on their site after adopting a strictly paid-for system, but the demographics of those who participate are unclear, as is how or whether the system has weeded out questionable comments—or simply pushed them to Facebook.
Trolls are often act-before-think personalities. A price barrier may force them away from their usual habits. But there are other solutions—ones that do not treat interested readers as grubstakes or disposable.
Various alternatives for improving comment systems have been proposed, like refusing to publish comments from anonymous accounts or verification processes that require commenters to prove they are human and to agree to abide by certain civility standards. Meanwhile, open-source tools are changing the way moderators review comments, while networks like Clapit and community management software like RebelMouse aggregate commentary from separate social feeds into a single place. Social media is being integrated into news sites to bolster engagement across platforms, and while this has its limitations, new aggregators might be able to overcome them too.
The fact is the legacy format of the comment box is now flawed and outdated. We need to innovate it, not price people out of it.
As Sheryl Sandberg said, “We can’t just treat the symptoms—we have to treat the cause. We need voices of tolerance and love to ring out across the world, because the best remedy to bad speech is more speech.”
Pricing out the trolls may stop some of the vitriol but it does not solve the underlying issue. What we need now is real dialogue online, not less. To do that we need to reconsider the value of keeping legacy systems and formats in place. Software makers and publishers need to think outside the box, but that doesn’t mean excluding some and not others from commenting inside of it.
Harriet Allner is a London-based communications executive at PHA Media by day and a freelance writer and blogger by night.
