Oh My Gosh… It’s Omakase!

It was bound to happen. Amazon has entered the contextual advertising game. In case you haven’t yet heard, Amazon.com’s system is called Omakase. Basically, Omakase places AdSense-style ad units on publishers’ Web pages, serving ads to products in the Amazon catalog.

The ads they serve are based on a combination of the site’s content, its sales record and the purchasing record of the user.

Or to put it more accurately, they’re based on the products the user has bought in the past, on the products the site’s users have bought… and just a very little on what the site’s about.

That’s the first important difference between Omakase and other contextualized ad systems: publishers are going to be serving different ads to different people. The publishers won’t be able to see all the ads they’re offering and it will be very difficult to try to bring up ads for expensive products or for popular items.

Omakase is apparently Japanese for something like “I’ll leave it to you,” and when it comes to the choice of ads you pretty much have to leave it to Amazon.

There’s another important difference between Omakase and other contextualized ad systems.

You don’t get paid per click. You don’t get paid per impression. You only get paid per sale.

So you could send a user to Amazon, he could surf around, see a different product, come back later to buy it… and you wouldn’t get a penny.

Sound familiar?

If you’re a member of any affiliate program – and you should be – it should be familiar. Omakase isn’t really a contextualized ad program like AdSense or YPN. It’s more like a kind of smart affiliate program. (Although with commissions ranging from 4 to 8.5 percent, it’s one with pretty low fees.)

Does that mean you should give it a try?

Not necessarily. If you’re already serving Amazon products to your users, then Omakase might help you increase your sales. The fact that the ads are going to be based on a lot more than what you think your users will be interested in could help you to increase your figures.

I don’t think that Omakase is going to worry Google. In fact, they let you use both. But as a source of supplementary income, it could certainly have its uses.

About Joel Comm

Joel is an Internet entrepreneur who has been online for over twenty years. In 1995, he launched WorldVillage.com, a family-friendly portal to the web which enjoys thousands of visitors each day. He is the co-creator of ClassicGames.com, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 1997, and is now known as Yahoo! Games. Joel has launched dozens of web sites, including the popular bargain-hunting shopping site, DealofDay.com, SafetySurf.com and FamilyFirst.com. Joel is the Internet Revenue Expert, speaking and writing on topics that help people make money online. He is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, “The AdSense Code”, and Host & Executive Producer of “The Next Internet Millionaire”, the world’s first competitive Internet reality show.

You can find Joel on Twitter: @joelcomm.