Amazon enters PPA contextual market

Posted by Allen Stern | 03/27/2007

Amazon announced today to its affiliates that their new PPA model has moved into Beta. Named "Context Links" the program most resembles those by Kontera and Vibrant Media. I have used Vibrant Media's Intellitxt offering on HTMLCenter and it has provided some additional revenue for the site without being overwhelming.

With Amazon's program, you just add code to your page and Amazon takes care of the rest. You are not technically "supporting" a specific product; Amazon figures out what to show. And the links are based on the words already within your content. So you might be wondering how this differs from the announcement from Google last week about their PPA offering. Pretty simple actually. With Google's PPA program, you add content to your page pushing the links. I believe Google's setup is more along the lines of the Payperpost model.

I have placed the code within some of the tutorials on HTMLCenter but it is not showing links yet (links are now showing). The Context Links setup is very easy and flexible... here is a screenshot:

Will these contextual (PPA) ads work long-term? I know they have worked for me for a couple of years and so far I have not had lots of pushback on HTMLCenter. You might be wondering if I will add them to CN... not yet, still working on the optimal setup for ads for CN.

It is interesting to think about how ads have evolved. We started outside the content, then moved inside with the 300 boxes and so forth and now we are linking the internal story content. Not sure we can go any much deeper than that!