Looking over the demo of booBox, the following publisher and reader attractive pitch:

We believe that in some point of your conversation there’s an opportunity to make money, to make some bucks of your opinion, but in a way that’s more like a service you’re delivering to your audience than making an interruption. We believe you can use either words or images to do it. At this moment the booBoxes come. A booBox is a tiny little box that will bring to your audience the wonderful world of e-commerce, without leaving your blog, using your words or pictures as a path to a shopping cart.

Too bad it’s only in private beta at the moment and very little details about how booBox will make money. My guess is a percentage of shopping images shown will be with booBox affiliate code or they will be getting a backend deal so a master code will pay them a percentage of any sale over the normal affiliate rate. They say it will cost us “nothing” and that makes me suspicious. Very little is free on the web, especially when it comes to affiliate program stuff. It if is possible for the booBox folks to create this service and not bleed sales or percentages off the backend that impact publishers it could be very successful.

All speculation beyond whether or not you find these kind of ads intrusive is off until somebody can actually test it. The demo seems a bit conceptual as of this writing. Not even TechCrunch was able to get into the private beta, it seems:

It’s not clear at all how blogs will integrate booBox into their sites, and that will be a very important issue (I’ve asked the company for an explanation). However, sales occur with the blogger’s own affiliate code, and the images that appear are based on tags that the blogger associates with the image. The company says they will work with other etailers besides Amazon as well.

I’m interested in exploring creative, but non-deceptive ways to provide site visitors and subscribers non-intrusive advertising along with content. Not sure if booBox will be used beyond testing on one or more of our sites, but I’d like to give it a try and will report back my findings if noteworthy. Signed up for the beta and waiting …

• Riya Teaseya
• Up to five step process sending money via PayPal with Skype 3.2 beta
• Google implements new Blogger features
• Blogger finally adds moblogging
• Pimping the blogosphere — good or evil?
• Chitika payments delayed, affiliates pissed again