Amazon has approached hand-picked sites with a beta test of its contextual ad program. This will put them in competition with Google and Yahoo!, not to mention the tardy MSN in the future.
As of now, Amazon is not revealing who is providing the ads, though a spokesperson has said that both the retailer and the affiliate will each get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks through. Just like Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network, the ads will be targeted based on the content on the Web page being viewed, with the links being seen on the pages of affiliates’ links to products on Amazon.
In an e-mail exchange, Andrew Herdener told ClickZ that “We believe that by working with a third-party to provide Associates with links to relevant Web sites, in addition to products on Amazon, that we can help them make more money from their sites. This will help us maintain long-term relationships with our Associates community that provides an important source of traffic to Amazon sites.” Herdener is an Amazon spokesperson.
The conflict that Amazon will face will be publishers who must ditch Google AdSense ads in order to test out Amazon’s new contextual ad program. Publishers may be hard-pressed to turn their backs on Google’s already-profitable program.
Source:
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/
searchinsider/wpn-49-20060207
AmazonEntersContextualAdMarket.html
http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/
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