Mark W. Shead

Amazon has launched an open beta of their contextual ads.  You install a piece of javascript at the bottom of your HTML page and it  will create links from words in your text to amazon products.  When you mouse over the links it shows you a preview of the product.  Clicking on the link takes you to the product page.

Here are a few initial thoughts:

1. The links look like regular links.  They aren’t the double underlines that other inline ad links use. This might cause some confusion because users can’t tell what ads are actually in your text and which ones came from Amazon (until they are moused over).
2. You have the ability to determine the maximum number of ads per page to tailor things for your audience.
3. The ads don’t show up immediately.  You Amazon has to scan your page first kind of like the Google Adsense Bot.
4. Some of the ads don’t seem particularly well targeted. They match the word, but not necessarily the meaning.  For example a page about cell phone batteries had an ad linking to a fiction book with the words batteries in the title.

All in all it looks like a decent way to monetize some content, but I’m concerned about the confusion for the users.  They may not look at any of your links once they have  clicked on a few and discovered that they are links to Amazon.