Amazon’s Joins Contextual Ads Competition
Amazon has started a beta test where it places contextual ads on third-party published sites, similar to those delivered by Yahoo or Google in their networks.
Everyone thought MSN would be the next major web power to deliver contextual ads and share revenue in a network of sites. How wrong we were. Amazon has joined the game well ahead of MSN’s forthcoming breakup with Overture in favor of its adCenter service.
They’ve been contacting select members of their associates programs, asking if they’d like to be beta testers. The way they want the beta test to work is to give you a special code for Amazon’s Keywords Recommends banners (the banners that you feed a keyword to and they show related products) and have this special code then show these new ads 50% of the time.
When I first heard about this I thought it’d be Amazon product listings displayed in an Adsense-like way and I figured it’d analyze your content for for products to serve, but they’d be Amazon products. Turns out I was wrong, they want their own contextual advertising network.