For those of you who want to make millions (or even 10s) on your blog, by pimping for faceless internet corporations on the digital equivalent of your soul, Amazon has added “Context links” to its affiliate program, aping google, but this time with a more targeted product base. Says Amazon:
Context Links is a tool to automatically identify and link contextually relevant phrases within your content to Amazon products. Links can be configured as conventional links or so that when a user hovers over any of these links, a small window appears showing a preview of the appropriate product from Amazon. We believe this product will unlock new ad inventory for you by identifying linking opportunities that you previously had not identified. It will also allow you to control the location and number of links on each page. In addition, Context Links can save you the time needed to manually create text links within your content.
See: Amazon Context Links
what do you think of this?
i don’t make any money from blogging, but i do get a enough amazon bucks every month to feed my book fetish and makes me happy. i basically write about whatever books i read / am interested in that month and point others to the amazon link – but i have to admit i haven’t thought too much about the ethics of this. i sometimes like seeing the amazon link, just so i can get a mental picture of the book cover – then i’ll pick it up next time i’m in a bookstore.
addendum: i should have said i don’t make any money *directly* from blogging. Indirectly, I’ve built several careers out of it.
i don’t think there’s much in the way of ethics to worry about… it’s more about whether the trade is worthwhile. is what you get out of the ads worth what you give to the advertisers (ie space on your website). how much would it cost for me to get you to wear a baseball cap every day that flashes ads for various commercial products? energizer batteries and ipods and nice stationary supplies? or to put a Calvin Klein ad on your front door? again: it’s not ethics, it’s whether you’re getting paid enough to give up some of your space.
if you are making enough amazon bucks to buy books, then it’s probably worth it…if i had more visitors to this site, it might be worth it to me. but i would make pennies from google, and my brief tries at amazon got me zilch. so to me it’s not worth it because i give away my digital space for nothing at all in return. why bother?
Interesting…