Recently I posted about the 'Cosmic Ordering' fad, and as I had an unused Amazon Associates account sitting around (where you earn a percentage of sales you refer to Amazon), I figured I'd link to the Cosmic Ordering book from the post and see if anyone bought it. About 25 people did, and I've made several pounds in commission.
On logging in today I noticed something new in my Amazon Associates account called "Self-Optimising Links". Basically it's like AdSense, but for Amazon's products.. a little like Chitika eMiniMalls, if you will. You simply choose the colors of the ads, choose an ad size, as with AdSense, then paste some JavaScript on your page. Amazon's bot will work out what your page is about and show products which match. You then earn your normal commission on any sales (it's not pay per click).
Here's what it looks like:
I've put it on my internal pages as a test, although it looks a little clunky the way I've done it. I'll see what happens over the next few days and report anything that comes up.
So this doesn't put you at odds with the Adsense TOS? Seems like it would, but IANAL.
Posted by: Larry Wright at May 6, 2006 02:11 PMI removed it very shortly afterwards because of worries over this. The problem is that Google Adsense "Program Policies" allow it, whereas the TOS do not, so their rules are a little inconsistent.
Actually, scrub that.. they're totally inconsistent. Google's TOS say "You further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s)"
Note 'content-targeted' rather than 'contextual'. 'Content-targeted' would also mean if you manually added Amazon affiliate links to a page with products related to the content, then you're still, in theory, breaking their terms. However, lots of people do this, including some of the top Adsense performers. Their "Program Policies" also explicitly ALLOW this, whereas the TOS explicity DISALLOW it.
I might ask on WMW about this as AdsenseAdvisor may have some answers..
Posted by: Peter Cooper at May 6, 2006 02:33 PMReturn to the homepage.
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