As you may know, last year Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a hefty $250 million.
Over this past weekend, readers started noticing that Washington Post editorial content suddenly had Amazon “Buy it now” buttons embedded directly in the body of some stories.
They appeared most prevalently in book reviews—like this one for Happy Wives Club, or this one for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:
WashPo (owned by Bezos) inserting AMZN “Buy It Now” buttons into articles. Via @tealtan
http://t.co/1SLZtMLlsp
pic.twitter.com/ZUqGLgPwEJ
— Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) August 17, 2014
When Mashable asked The Post about this creepy development, they received a statement claiming it was all an accident:
“What happened was, with the recent introduction of our new article format, the button functionality at first was not supported but was able to be added back in the last few days,” Kris Coratti, director of communications for The Post, told Mashable in a statement. “The button was inadvertently incorporated into the text of stories rather than on the side, which is why people thought it was new. As we work to resume our previous years-long practice, we have removed the button from stories.”
Despite that, some “Buy It Now” buttons remain in the body of some articles, while others have been removed and put to the side, as was standard in WaPo past.
Curious, nonetheless.