New Amazon Context Link Ads

The Amazon affiliate program continues to grow. The latest is the beta release of their Context Ads program. The context links ads are automatically served based on your site’s content. The links show up within your content and then you can customize what the window looks like when someone mouses over your link.

It looks something like this when you mouse over a link:

If you have a site that is consumer oriented, especially one with product reviews, this may be worth giving a try.

The program is very easy to set up – you just paste a small script within your site’s code, and you only have to do it once. Amazon serves the links automatically based on the phrases and key words in your content. You can also choose the categories from which the products are served.

I think I may try it on one of my sites that gets decent traffic but not a lot of Adsense clicks and see how the two programs compare.

Has anyone else tried this out yet? What do you think of Amazon’s latest tool for monetizing your site? Is it a threat to Google Adsense or will it just make the market more competitive?

UPDATE – I had originally posted that you can’t run these two programs together, however, according to Jensense and ProBlogger.net, Adsense has changed the rules on this. Since they are displayed differently, they are okay.