On Monday, Seth Godin published a blog post titled “The Amazon tax,” and by Tuesday it had 895 points and 525 comments on Hacker News. The argument: Amazon’s advertising system has turned its search results into a pay-to-play scheme, and the company is effectively stealing from the customers it claims to serve. The post struck a nerve because it names something everyone who has searched for a product on Amazon in the last three years has felt — the first screen of results is no longer the best match for your query. It’s the best match for someone’s ad budget.
But Godin has the victim wrong. The “Amazon tax” isn’t a tax on customers. It’s a rent bill — and the people who have to pay it are the third-party sellers who spent a decade believing Amazon was their partner.
The End of a Subsidy
Here’s the number that matters: Amazon’s advertising revenue hit $17.24 billion in Q1 2026, up roughly 22% year over year. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a business the size of a Fortune 100 company, built almost entirely on the backs of the merchants who list on Amazon’s marketplace.
For 25 years, Amazon ran a cross-subsidy. It used seller margin and investor patience to subsidize low prices, fast shipping, and generous returns for customers. The company lost money on e-commerce for years, and sellers accepted thin margins because Amazon delivered volume. The deal was implicit: we’ll take a cut, but we’ll send you customers.
The ad system is the moment that deal expired. Amazon didn’t suddenly become greedy. It stopped being able to afford the subsidy — or, more precisely, it realized it didn’t have to. The cost of the marketplace was always there. It was just being paid by someone else.
The Tenants Thought They Were Partners
The people who should be angriest about the “Amazon tax” are not the customers scrolling past a sponsored result. They’re the sellers watching their cost-per-click climb 34% year over year for Sponsored Products and 49% for Sponsored Display, according to Jungle Scout’s 2026 State of the Amazon Seller Report. A seller who stops advertising sees sales drop sharply — the organic listing that used to carry them no longer does.
One seller in a 400-reply thread on Amazon’s own seller forums put it plainly: “I built my business on this platform for nine years. Now I’m paying Amazon more for ads than I pay myself in salary. I don’t have a business anymore. I have a job with a very demanding boss.”
That’s the real story. The “Amazon tax” isn’t a tax on consumers. It’s the moment a landlord told his tenants the rent was going up — and the tenants realized they’d never owned the building.
The Marketing Guru’s Toll Booth
And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: Seth Godin helped build the intellectual case for this. For three decades, Godin has preached that attention is the only currency that matters, that permission is an asset to be harvested, that the job of a marketer is to find the people who want to hear from you and talk to them relentlessly. He didn’t invent performance marketing, but he gave it a philosophy.
Amazon just built the toll booth. The ad system is the logical endpoint of the worldview Godin has been selling since the 1990s: if attention is the only currency, then whoever controls the attention gets to charge for it. Amazon controls the attention of the world’s largest online marketplace. Of course it charges.
The complaint is a bit rich coming from the man who wrote the manual. Godin is right that Amazon’s search results have gotten worse. But the machine that made them worse is the same machine he spent his career teaching people to feed.
The “Amazon tax” isn’t a betrayal of Amazon’s customers. It’s the end of a subsidy that customers never knew they were getting — and the beginning of a rent bill that sellers always should have seen coming.