Chris Beasley at Sitepoint reveals that Amazon, the world’s largest online bookstore, is interested in starting their own ad network similar to Adsense. It’s not what you think: contextual ads to serve up Amazon’s own products. They intend to “clone” Adsense. This test is only being offered to a few hand-picked sites by Amazon.
With two major players, Google and Yahoo, already in the game and MSN coming up with Adcenter, online contextual advertising could become crowded in the near future with many opportunities for web publishers to monetize their content.