Alexa, can't you stop all those ads on Amazon?

Jefferson Graham | USA TODAY

Alexa, can't you fix this?

You're not imagining that you're seeing more ads on Amazon. They are out in force. Paid ads for non-Amazon products continue to litter the top of the page and get sprinkled throughout product search results, which is bound to create lots of confusion for customers.

We told you about the increasing presence of ads about a year ago. And now AP wrote about them a couple of days ago. One thing hasn't changed in the past year: It's still an inconvenience for the consumer.

Kat Eller Murray, a Los Angeles mom with two young kids, told us in 2018 that she shops on Amazon all the time for the kids and tries to tune out the sponsored ads. "I won’t even look at them because I know they’re sponsored,” she says. “Very rarely are they what I want.”

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It hasn't gotten any better since.

Recently, I searched for a Sony A6100 camera and saw Nikon cameras as the top (sponsored) result. Welch's Red Grape Juice brought up IZZE sparkling juices, men's denim shirt showed me women's "wedgie jeans" and when I tried to shop for Dell laptops, Amazon instead showed me the Microsoft Surface.

As any web searcher knows, the culprit is money. Amazon operates on razor-thin margins, and actually loses money on its speedy delivery. So it looks to online advertising to make up the difference.

And in just a few years, Amazon has quietly become the third-largest ad platform in the U.S. after Google and Facebook. It brought in $4.6 billion worth of revenue for sponsored ads in 2018, up from $1.8 billion the previous year, according to eMarketer. The company is on track to grow these ads to $10.9 billion by 2020.

Total Amazon sales, which include the AWS web serving business, Amazon's most profitable unit, come in at just under $200 billion for the 9-month period.

In September, Amazon began putting three sponsored ads at the top of its search results, up from two, according to Marketplace Pulse, a research firm that focuses on Amazon and other online marketplaces.

For looking up products, many consumers go to Amazon first instead of Google, according to Jumpshot, which monitors online shopping behavior. As Amazon enters its busiest season, the holidays, shoppers will be confronted in their searches by products, not the best-reviewed or best selling options, but the ones that manufacturers paid for to be the first thing consumers see at the top of the list.

Amazon’s ads show up at the top, middle and the bottom of its search listings, as well as within pages for other products. They look exactly like regular product listings except for the word “Sponsored” in gray. Holiday shoppers may notice more of them.

Randy Lehrman, who runs a Los Angeles-based DJ entertainment service, says he finds the ads very annoying. "I don’t need ads. How about some deals and the best products at the top of the screen?

Because Amazon pushes its own products so heavily, for manufacturers who want to reach consumers, spending money on search ads is their only surefire way to appear at the top of results.

Erik Gordon, a professor who follows Amazon at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said the ads at the top of a search implies to many visitors that the products are the most popular.

“It is not misleading in the legal sense, but it borders on a breach of trust with visitors,” he said.

That could, in turn, drive some customers away from the site – but perhaps not enough for Amazon to change its behavior.

“Amazon is gambling that it will make enough money off the ads to offset the loss from visitors who notice that products at the top are sponsored,” Gordon said.

Amazon has many ways to filter results, showing you just products that qualify for Prime shipping (as part of the $119 yearly expedited shipping and entertainment membership), only ones that have 5-star reviews and more. But cutting out the ads isn't one of your choices.

On Facebook, Los Angeles mom Serena Ehrlich said she was very frustrated with Amazon's ad push. "Most often it simply confuses me and delays my process. It is not enough for me to stop shopping but I find I am spending more time before I get to Amazon researching things out so I'm not swayed at the point of sale."

Readers: how frustrated are you with Amazon's ads? Enough so to shop elsewhere? Chime in on Twitter, where I'm @jeffersongraham