@andrewchen

New here? Check out my list of featured essays · Blogging roadmap · Ask me anything

Trying out the new Amazon Recommendations widget

I recently read about Amazon’s new recommendation widget and I’d try it out. I think it’s another neat example of why even though Amazon’s business is almost all retail, they are really more of a technology company at heart.

Anyway, an example of the widget should show up here:

… and I also stuck it on the right side of this blog. (Obviously not helpful at all for the majority of my audience which I’d guess use RSS readers or email to follow my posts)

In general I’ve found that the Google ads on my site absolutely don’t monetize at all – no surprise there :) Let’s see how these do.

Like this post?
If you liked this post, please subscribe or follow me on Twitter. You can also find more essays here.

Written by Andrew Chen
July 2nd, 2008 at 6:14 pm
  • http://www.devinreams.com/ Devin Reams

    Neat recommendations. Kinda scary. Kinda scary effective.

    You’ve gotta love the companies that know more about me than me.

  • http://scrobbld.com ian

    You may also find a bit more monetisation as my adblock doesn’t get rid of the Amazon widget, but I never even see a Google ad.

    1 year = $100 (with > 200 visits per day) = google ads… so about $0.001 per visitor ;) how could you ever beat that sweet figure huh??

  • yeah

    I dont know. That “andrew ringtone” ad is pretty tempting.

  • http://programmerjoe.com Joe Ludwig

    I think it’s funny that the widget is recommending something I’ve already purchased from Amazon. How many USB GPS dongles does it think I need, anyway?

  • http://twitter.com/ianmcall Ian McAllister

    You’ve got a lot of duplication in your title tags so unfortunately the recommended pages don’t show much of the actual post title. May or may not help you from a SEO perspective but I’ll make a suggestion to the team who built the Rec Pages widget that they allow users to filter out certain text from anchor text.

    I actually got a really great rec for a book I hadn’t heard of before, “Designing the Moment: Web Interface Design Concepts in Action”. I went ahead and bought it.

Recent posts

Want more? Featured essays and book recommendations