Does it even have a chance? I mean, AdWords pretty much owns the market, doesn’t it? Eh, we’ll see how this goes and take it from there…
Chris Beasley at SitePoint: Amazon-Sense? – Beasley reports that Amazon is thinking about getting into the contextual ad business. Now, some I’ve read tonight have scoffed at this, but you have to remember the Amazon folks are smart – A9, Alexa, etc. I look forward to big things.
Beasley wrote:
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.On the phone last night it was explained to me that this is more or less an Adsense clone, meaning third party sponsored links, not Amazon links. It is known that Amazon currently get’s sponsored links for their own sites from Google, but apparently they wish to take out the middleman and break out on their own. 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. So I think there is probably a little bit of business jealousy at work here, and rightly so. 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. It’s kinda funny, 5 years ago people were speaking about the death of online advertising, and now its huge.
Yeah, it is gonna be hard to get big publishers to test it out while foregoing revenue. I wonder if Amazon would be able to supply the same amount of revenue, though.
Anyone out there in the beta? Source: All About The Web
[tags]business,amazon,adwords,jealousy,internet destination[/tags]