There is speculation in the blogosphere that Amazon is tossing around the idea of starting its own program similar to Google Adsense. Chris Beasley explains the situation best by saying:
"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. So I think there is probably a little bit of business jealousy at work here, and rightly so. Amazon realizes that if they want to compete as a major Internet destination, not just an ecommerce site, they need to capture a larger chunk of the online advertising revenue. "
I just wonder if other larger online businesses which are reliant on other companies for contextual ads will take similar approaches and start cutting out the middleman. Quigo offers a product called Adsonar Private Marketplace that may help if creating your own sponsored link program and technology platform is too big of an undertaking.
