Amazon continues to be one of the few online retailers that doesn't think like a retailer. Yesterday they announced ClickRiver, a proprietary pay-per-click network through which they will auction text ad space on Amazon.com product pages. On one hand this isn't new because they've run various forms of Google ads on Amazon pages for some time now, and the store long ago became a multi-retailer location with their Amazon Marketplace and other partnership initatives.

But ignoring the debate about whether they should be the click broker themselves or tie into another network, this move shows that Amazon understands a lot more than most about the way people use the web and the role their pages play in that process. In essence:

• People are interested in a huge array of products and services, many of which even Amazon doesn't carry. The ClickRiver ads are limited to products/services complimentary to any given product and non-competitive to Amazon.

• People know how to click (and leave) a web page to go find what they need. Not putting these ads there will not prevent them from wandering off to find these accessories (or whatever) if that is what they want to do.

• Their SEO success brings a lot of traffic, which both creates revenue also drives bandwidth and hardware costs. A great many of these clicks/people probably are looking for something related to the items but not the items themselves.

• If they're going to leave, you may as well get paid. Even if Amazon has conversion rates 3-5x the industry average (and I don't think they do) there are tens of millions of visitors leaving every day without buying something. But Amazon knows something of their interest and intention based on their navigation - the odd of ClickRiver ads being relevant is very high.

I just did some back-of-the-analytics math on for another retailer, and found that at $0.50/click the value of 1/3 of non-purchasing uniques would currently be worth upwards of $2M annually. That's a double-digit percentage of total revenue in this case. Could they capture that high a percentage, or that CPC, and do so without cannibalizing their own sales?

Impossible to say. Worth figuring out.

A related thought: Google Adsense should enabled any retailer to do this by making it possible to filter the ads displayed on your page by item/brand/category in addition to just blacklisting certain competitive URLs. They're scanning the target page anyway to calculate their quality score they so should be able to do a pretty good job assuring that ads are in fact complimentary and non-competitive. It would be great to allow all retailers to apply Amazon's strategy.