Most of you know that I’ve been a member of the Amazon Associates program for awhile now and when I do reviews of stuff I usually build in links to Amazon for folks interested in purchasing them. I’ve made a couple of bucks off these links, but nothing substantial and that’s fine as I never expected to get rich off of it.
Now they’ve just announced a new feature they’re offering Associates called Contextual Links. You’ve probably seen these on other websites, mostly tech news sites, but in case you haven’t what they do is scan the page for content and then will create links out of some words that point back to Amazon.com products. If you click a link I get a referral fee. It’s basically a lazy man’s why to monetize content.
I’m torn on whether or not to participate in the beta. On the one hand I wouldn’t mind having a way to earn a couple bucks off the content I put up, but on the other I’ve been on sites that use these links and they can be a tad annoying. So I’m looking for feedback from you regulars. Would you guys be upset if I participated in this program? I have no idea how many links would end up on any particular page, but the email I got on it said that I’d have the ability to limit how many links are made and even what parts of the content would be processed. Again, it’s not something I’d expect to get rich off of, but if it generated a couple of extra bucks every now and then that’d be a nice way to offset the cost of running the site.
I’ve considered applying for Google Adsense again, but they rejected me the last two times because I have naughty words on my site and I’m not entirely sure that’d be any less annoying. Anyway, I’d like your feedback on it. Let me know what you think.