Amazon Clickriver

There is so much money to make in the online advertising business, that everybody wants a share of it. Amazon has been doing all kinds of things lately...Apart from launching unarguably, the most successful e-commerce website, it added an affliate program that gave the capability for affiliates big/small to sell their merchandise through Amazon.com. It even got into the business of making portals (Target, ToysRus etc), and then went about leasing out the enormous hardware that it had created(while building it's big e-store), apart from making it's software re-usable, all through a set of very well-defined webservices. This move has decreased entry cash barriers for start-ups as they no longer need to "invest" in technology, hardware or waste their time worrying about these frills during the initial phases plan inception, execution. Amazon reduces their head-aches by giving them a pay per usage model that can just scale, scale and scale!

The latest by Amazon has been it's entry into the Google Adwords area with it's Clickriver product allowing businesses to place sponsored links on Amazon.com.. There are already a few players here, Yahoo with Panama, Ask.com with it's ad program, Google with Adwords etc.

With Clickriver, a wide range of complementary products and services can be advertised at the precise moment that someone is interested -- as they shop, browse, and search on Amazon.com. For example, ads from banks can display on pages for finance and investment books, such as on the "Road to Wealth" product page. Ads from photo printing services can display next to search results for cameras and tripods. Ads for hotels, car rentals and travel agencies can display on pages for travel books, sunglasses, suitcases, portable DVD players and other travel accessories sold on Amazon.com. Clickriver is driven by Amazon's A9 search engine.

A9 would compete with Google not on web search, where Google has a strong advantage, but on advertising, where Amazon has its massive catalog and experience selling products to leverage. Looks like that is exactly what A9 is doing..
This whole online search, shopping, advertising business seems so vibrant!