The contextual advertising market is seeing some interesting developments lately! Amazon contacted some of its affiliates (like Chris Beasley at SitePoint) in order to take part in a beta testing campain of their new, adsense-like contextual ads program (showing third party sponsored links, not only their products).

Since Google is not allowing adsense publishers to take part in another similar program on the pages with AdSense ads, Amazon offers 100$ to their new affiliates.

After Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Microsoft’s AdCenter, web publishers are getting a fourth choice

USA and Canada are the biggest markets when we are talking about search engine marketing (SEM). According to “The State of Search Engine Marketing 2005″ report released by SEMPO advertisers in USA and Canada spent $5.75 billion on SEM, mostly on paid placement. They predict that SEM spending in North America will reach $11 billion in 2010.

Coldplay fans listen up:

Skype, the world’s most popular VOIP service, has announced on their web site that anyone who leaves a voicemail via Skype to Coldplay will be contacted by the band. They say: anyone! Purpose of this is to promote a Coldplay newly released song Talk. Now, that is a great way to use VOIP for promoting a song.

So, this way you can ask the band how is the weather, future plans, about concerts or to ask Chris Martin something about Gwyneth Paltrow.

Let’s talk!

At the end of every year, people start making predictions for the upcoming year. So far, many experts from the online industry gave their predictions. I’m including you two links. One is from ClickZ which published predictions conducted with different CEOs and compiled by Zach Rogers.

Also, you can read predictions of Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs, Inc. which is recently sold to AOL.

I’ve just seen this interesting link compilation of the most searched keywords on major search engines on Serbian Biznis Blog.

Google Zeitgeist

Yahoo! 2005 Top Searches

AOL Search Year in Review

Lycos 50

Different search engines – different results. It seems that favorite calebrity for Googlers is Janet Jackson for Yahoo! users it is Britney Spears and Lycos users like Paris Hilton .