After the better part of a year in beta, Clickriver is open for business. Clickriver was developed by Amazon’s subsidiary A9.com to allow advertisers to display text ads alongside Amazon’s products and search results. Clickriver combines keyword and category targeting to outperform leading search engines in conversions to orders.
Here’s what the ads look like (albeit a bit shrunk to fit here):
Evidently, Amazon is certain that the ads won’t cannibalize their own sales. Advertised products must be complementary, sold off-site and not in competition with what Amazon is selling on the page. That’s what Amazon said anyway. A look at their site shows that the ads are often for similar and sometimes identical products. The ads appear to be geo-targeted as well as keyword/category targeted.
Other features such as street level photos integrated with map search are under development. Judging from the price of Amazon’s stock lately, they must be on to a good thing!