The coop is an advertising network. Basically, you agree to put anywhere from 1 to 5 text links or banners (text or image) on every page in your site, and you will receive equivalent coverage from other sites in the network. The coverage is based on # of pages and your home page google pagerank value. The benefit is that you get links to your site from a large number of other sites, helping generate a small amount of traffic, and as a side benefit it helps search engine visibility as well. You can see my implementation of coop network ads at either www.bkweddings.com or www.ovenbuns.com. There is no requirement as to the prominence of the ads on anyone's site. There is a set of requirements for the ads themselves, though. There is a set of guidelines here: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/guidelines.html, Which as a prospective member you will have to follow and you can expect anybody advertising on your site to follow as well. (occasionally violaters do get through, but the community is pretty good at spotting them and reporting them and typically they will get banned from the network quickly). I personally was a little shy to join the network, but saw some definitive results within literally days of joining. Adding the advertisements to your site is relatively easy, but it's easiest if you have a php site, and even easier if you can just stick it in an existing common footer file. Barring that, there are several other solutions for getting it up and running on your site (asp, perl, etc.) I hope I was clear here. Let me know if you have any other questions.
dave23m, check this link : http://co-op-faq.blogspot.com/2005/02/1-co-op-introduction.html Its the unofficial co-op faq well written by T0PS30. ( one of our supermoderator ) Hope that helps.
No, they are not related but I believe that as the network grows that will happen. I like it the way it is, I am not sending traffic to compeditors.