The text advertising links are ubiquitous and a large percentage of these websites are turning into middlemen, including this blog. Take a look at the text links on the right - I am trying to get in the middle of the clickstream that pays.
Some sites are even less scrupulous than the googles and yahoos. They don’t seperate out the advertising links from content links or they attempt to put together “content” for the purpose of driving clicks to paying partners. I don’t know much about this company but i’d venture guess PriceScan.com is one of them. They do call themselves “unbiased” and have a nice page of principles. They say
Q: Are vendors required to pay a fee to be listed in the shopping guide?A: At PriceSCAN we believe that consumers should have access to unbiased reporting on products and prices. It seems obvious to us that if a price guide restricts its listings to those vendors who have paid to be included, then its database more accurately reflects the source of its revenue, not necessarily the best products at the lowest prices.
At PriceSCAN we accept no money from any vendors for listing their products and prices.
Notice how they said that they don’t get paid for listing. With the magic of PPC you can get paid for driving traffic, even though you never told the customer that you are going to get paid for that click.
Of course, PriceSCAN may be a bunch of scrupulous nice guys, and they indeed don’t get paid PPC. My point is that there are a lot of less scrupulous folks out there and there’s a lot of PPC advertising masquarading as content.
Interesting, isn’t it?