Ads on Amazon

While perusing Digg.com yesterday I came upon a link to this blog entry on the possibility of Amazon adding some kind of advertising to searches, similar to adsense or google ads. The article links directly to this entry from someone confronted by Amazon to test the service.

I get a bad feeling about this. As a consumer, I generally do not look around Amazon hoping to get bombarded with ads. I know what I want and enjoy the suggestions for other things on Amazon that I might also like. But I don't want fictioncontests.com to show up as a result on amazon when I'm looking for the latest edition of Writer's Market. I forgive Google for doing this because they are so good at the service they provide. Amazon, not so much.

The bigger worry for me is that Amazon is also starting to develop content on their site. With the Amazon shorts, Customer Forums, author blogs, and the talk of tv shows and digital pages, it means that Amazon may suddenly start adding advertisements next to content from other publishers. The Google book program at least pays the publisher for any ads clicked during searches on the titles. Will Amazon be so generous or will they slap ads next to content that the user paid for whenever the user tries to read/ watch said content? And how will publishers work on the no-advertisement clauses that are rampant in author contracts? This move should raise some major concerns for the media industries.