The Wall Street Journal reports that delivery service DoorDash "has started selling restaurant ads that appear atop the search results in its app, as companies in the largely money-losing food-delivery industry dive deeper into advertising to boost revenue. The company already let marketers pay to run ads offering free delivery or discounts, as well as banner ads, but hadn’t offered ads above its search results before it began testing the tool earlier this year."
At the same time, the story says, "DoorDash is launching 'featured listings' for consumer packaged goods brands to boost their placement within the convenience and grocery categories.
The Journal notes that "DoorDash is wary of turning off consumers in the competitive food-delivery business by shoveling too many ads into its app. For restaurants, it will display only one sponsored listing on top of search results or in cuisine-specific sections of the app. For other areas, like the grocery, convenience, pet or alcohol categories, it will allow two ads."
- KC's View:
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DoorDash should be wary. It was just a few weeks ago that Amazon was getting grief about allowing its search results to become cluttered by paid ads.
