According to Chris Beasley, Amazon is cooking up their own Adsense-clone and offered him the chance to get into the early testing. He turned them down twice:

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.

We’ve been Amazon affiliates for many years now and this is the first I heard about this program. The last beta we tried was their product preview ads, which I liked. I also like the idea of them getting into the contextual ad game. The more the merrier, as far as I’m concerned. I logged into the Amazon Associates publisher area and don’t see any word about this beta program that Beasley claims stopped taking new beta testers on January 31.

We still haven’t been able to get into the Alexa Web Services program and no developers I’ve asked yet have gotten in either. So I’m left to believe that the whole Amazon/Alexa crew must run really small, exclusive beta tests.

Perhaps they should broaden their net of beta testers instead of trying to hook all the big fish out there, and try to bait some more of us small ones? It is kind of ironic how that works: talk to the big fish and they pass and then you alienate the small fish by not inviting them, so who are you left with? The really, really small fish? Seems like adverse selection at play here.

The Amazon Associate program, probably because they are on such thin margins, has never really paid that well. I’m curious if their AmazonSense will be competitive.

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