The Amazon Associates program have just gotten a bit more interesting. There’s a contextual beta out now, which means that Amazon is prowling your content and does special links for keywords that they can sell relevant products for. Like this (screenshot from Thought Garage):
The Amazon Associates Blog describes it like this:
Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your website and monetize your content. Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products, unlocking new ad inventory and saving you the time from having to manually create links. You can add the links to your pages in minutes, and we provide a wealth of options to customize how they are displayed.
Personally I think this is a great move and something we will see more of. People seems to accept these special underlined ads in the content, and it’s a pretty nifty way to monetize your blog.
What do you think of contextual ads in the content?
Originally posted on March 28, 2007 @ 1:47 am
Hate ’em. They interfere with the mechanics of reading. Probably good for people who see a blog as a place to put ads, but bad for people who expect bloggers to say something worth reading.
So the words lose their meaning if they have links in ’em? Then you hate traditional links in blog posts too?
Legitimate ads are just as anoying if poorly designed.
I just don’t want anyone mucking about with the file that’s displayed in my browser. Microsoft tried something similar a few years ago and was roundly lambasted. If MS was behind contextual ads today, attitudes would be different.
Make that “legitimate links”.
So basically what you’re saying is that you dislike links in text?
They are not intrusive at all!
I find them interesting. If you talk about the popup in the links, i heard that have an option to disable that too. I dont see any reason how they are different from traditional links!
–R
I don’t mind the odd one here or there when it’s obvious (double-underline and different colour to normal hyperlinks, for example) but some pages are so stuffed full of them that it gets hard to navigate (I often leave my mouse pointer on the page and use the scroll wheel to page down, inadvertently popping up any inline ads that happen to fall under the pointer). It does interrupt the flow for me, but I’ll get used to it I suppose. Don’t think it’s going to go away.
“…what you’re saying is that you dislike links in text?”
Not what I said, as I suspect you know.
I don’t want these links in the middle of web content any more than I want classified ads showing up in the middle of the newspaper articles I read. Segregate ads on the page and I might look at them. Use contextual liks and I’ll ignore the entire site.