There is a buzz in the online advertising world that Amazon.com plans to come out with their own contextual advertising program similar to that of Google Adsense and YPN. They have long been users of the Adsense program, but feel they could do much better for themselves with their own program in place, and also provide a competitive solution to online publishers. The word got out when they approached some of their current associates with the Beta program invite.
I feel the same way about this as I did when I heard that Google plans to provide rich media to Adsense publishers. This can be a win win for Amazon.com or a complete bust. As a publisher, I sure don’t mind these large companies (Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon) competing for my traffic and ad revenue, but can Amazon really compete here?
The problem arises when Amazon.com, like Yahoo! and Google require their publishers to only display their contextual ads on any given page. Are that many publishers going to turn from Adsense to Amazon’s program? Can they better the Big G? This is interesting stuff that can have a long term impact. Let’s keep watching to see where this leads.
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