Written By Reprise Media | February 6, 2006 | Share This |

amazon flows.jpg

Look out, Google (and Yahoo! and MSN)…Amazon looks to be the latest entrant into the contextual advertising game, at least according to this Site-Point post by Chris Beasley. He writes that the ecommerce site has been quietly asking some participants in its assocites programs if they’d help beta test an advertising network similar to Google’s. Says Beasley, “it was explained…that this is more or less an AdSense clone, meaning third party sponsored links.”

Amazon already has its A9.com search engine, and a mapping service that shows ground-level photos of many given addresses. Throw in the new contextual ad network, and it almost seems like they’re trying to make themselves over in Google’s image (not that we’d ever have trouble telling the difference).

Hopefully, the ad network won’t be Amazon’s bungle in the jungle; they might be having trouble finding willing volunteers to test their ad network, as they recently upped their beta sign-up bonus from 50 bucks to 100. But emulating Google’s business model wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Beasley explains:

“The fact is that while Amazon has a high gross revenue, they have really thin profit margins, whereas Google and even eBay have much better profit margins…Amazon realizes that if they want to compete as a major Internet destination, not just an ecommerce site, they need to capture a larger chunk of the online advertising revenue.”

Even if it’s been slow going so far for Amazon’s version of AdSense, the site is having better luck adding even more user-generated content to their product pages. Ross Mayfield writes that Amazon has again rolled out ProductWikis after a brief absence. Any user can write, edit or otherwise contribute to the Wiki appearing on each product page - or erase it entirely. Doing the latter, however, could get you into a pointless internet fight (is there another kind?) - Wiki editors are notified via email if an entry they’ve previously worked on is altered.

Topics: Advertising: Contextual |