It’s funny, the attention some random post in this space attracts. Mere hours after I wrote a little something about Web video distributor iAmplify, I got an invite from one of their sales reps to join their affiliate network.

And I did, as signified by the little javascripted video-ad box in the upper-left sidebar of this page, and the larger version of that box at the bottom of this page/post.

The little box represents the carving out of new advertising territory on this blog. The big box displaces the YouTube-AdSense video ad unit that Google rolled out last October; my willingness to toss that one should tell you how poorly it was performing, in fact contrasting the other AdSense placements I run here.

In any case, iAmplify is appearing here on a trial basis. I’m curious to see if it’ll bring in any money. I’m not optimistic: Not only does someone have to actually buy a video through iAmplify for me to see any coin, but the product selection is limited and not synced at all to specific page content. For a generalist blog like mine, that means someone cruising here via a Google search for, say, iPod information won’t be served up an offer for instructional videos for best practices in using your digital media player. The reason AdSense attracts clicks is precisely because it matches up relevant keywords in content and ads. So first task for iAmplify is to figure out some way to achieve that.

On top of that, the boxes don’t seem to be screwing with the blog template. If they turn out to do so, or somehow slow down loading times, they’re gone.

All that said, you never know. It’s worth a month or two of testing to see if it yields anything.