The folks over at Amazon We b Services point us to the new TicTac Contextual Ads service, which displays ads from Amazon and lets you make money by inserting your Amazon Associates ID into the resulting links. Looks like a cool little system. You can use CSS to change the look of the ads, and you can specify keywords a la Chitika.
Note that by default this is a contextual ad system that looks at the page title and the meta tags (description and keywords) to build the Amazon search string. If you want to use this system on a page that's displaying AdSense ads, you must use the non-contextual mode where you specify the search criteria.
Amazon's preview features means that more details about the products popup when you hover over an ad with your mouse. Note sure yet if I like this feature or not. Check out this page to see what I mean. The ads are on the right.
They're not charging anything for this, I suspect they plan to make money by directing more traffic to their site. Their whole business model is built around Amazon.
Something to play with, but I wouldn't ditch AdSense or anything…
Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.