The news is out about Google's new content-targeted ads, which are text-ads that show up based on the content of a page. David Galbraith spotted that this is the first visible effect of Blogger's Googliness: "This is huge. The first signs of what the Google/Blogger combination will yield are shown with Google's latest Adwords initiative." (Update: Apparently, David no longer thinks it's huge.) We've been running the new content-sensitive text ads for a little over a week. (See BlogRoots thread from before the news was official.)
Here are some exmples of Blog*Spot sites with, seemingly, good targeting (at least at the time of this posting):
1, 2, 3. Not all of them work that well, but that's pretty damn impressive, I think. The Habitat and Charity ads you'll see are for URLs the content targeter is not familiar with yet.
It's pretty early in this experiment, and as David points out, there are some things to work on (#3, I imagine, is non-trivial, and I'm not sure if we'd want to do #1, at least the inline part). But it seems like this is a big win for us and Blogger users: Less-ugly, once-in-a-while-even-useful ads that make hosting these thousands of sites an economically reasonable endeavor. Neat.
Here are some exmples of Blog*Spot sites with, seemingly, good targeting (at least at the time of this posting):
1, 2, 3. Not all of them work that well, but that's pretty damn impressive, I think. The Habitat and Charity ads you'll see are for URLs the content targeter is not familiar with yet.
It's pretty early in this experiment, and as David points out, there are some things to work on (#3, I imagine, is non-trivial, and I'm not sure if we'd want to do #1, at least the inline part). But it seems like this is a big win for us and Blogger users: Less-ugly, once-in-a-while-even-useful ads that make hosting these thousands of sites an economically reasonable endeavor. Neat.