Being more a software person than a writer, I wrote my own contextual ad delivery system, using affiliate ads for inventory.
Last week, Google rolled out a very similar feature for AdWords [1], claiming it "leads to more clicks, higher quality leads, and higher ROI for your search ads".
Encouraged by that I built a technology demonstrator for my ad delivery technology: http://demo.qontex.com/
Based on my experiments, the contextual technology works roughly as well as Google AdSense does (I do have an advantage in that I don't need to worry about click-fraud).
Here's a few samples, based on the top HN stories when I submitted this:
http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/744199---israelification-high-security-little-bother
http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://stacksmashing.net/2010/11/15/cracking-in-the-cloud-amazons-new-ec2-gpu-instances/
http://demo.qontex.com/?url=http://brokenbottleboy.tumblr.com/post/1583250140/facebook-messaging-scorned-by-nerds-built-for&categories=Books
I'd love some suggestions for what I should do with this? Should I try and licence the technology (to who?) or should I try marketing it to webmasters (and how would the finances work there? It seems odd to charge a website to run ads on it)? Or maybe I should be paying people to run my ads on their site?
[1] http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/11/product-listing-ads-rolling-out-to-all.html