being a retailer sucks, low profit margins

however being a "platform" (i.e. middle-man) between retailers and customers is highly profitable

guess which one Amazon is mostly now?

All while disclaiming all responsibility for all the low quality / dangerous / poisonous crap they facilitate sale of. Talk about having your cake and eating it too

Amazon puts sponsored product listings in the search results. The more you search without finding the product you want, the more ad impressions are generated.

Amazon needs to actually sell you things to make money. They have an entire supply chain built around it. Ads that never convert aren’t gonna pay for that.

Ad impressions are orders of magnitude less profitable than getting someone to buy something.

It wouldn’t be net positive at all to hide products you want in order to get a fraction of a penny from ad impressions.

This is the type of conspiracy theory that immediately falls apart if you think about the numbers at all.