Google makes it official…

Well Google has gone and made it official, extending its Adwords program to the pages of HowStuffWorks, Blogger, and Weather Underground. The new program is called Content Targeted Advertising.

if users look up the weather forecast for Palm Springs on a weather site, they may see ads for deals on hotels and cars in the Palm Springs area. Or, if users are reading about how an acoustic guitar works on a music site, they may see ads for hand-crafted acoustic guitars.

The service offers a great new tool for advertisers. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ll continue to strive to mold Blogads into a tool that offers additional advantages to bloggers and advertisers:

a) Bloggers get the bulk of the proceeds from their Blogads sales.

b) Bloggers get to approve every ad before it appears.

c) Advertisers get more options (images, longer text, comments.)

d) Advertisers can use superlatives like “lowest” and “best” which are not allowed in Google Adwords.

e) Google kills ads that don’t get a 1% clickthru, so its tool is only effective for direct marketers, not brand-builders.

We’ll scramble to keep Blogads differentiated. Google may be a brilliant and wonderfully benign company… but if it does get a monopoly on blog advertising, innovation will slow.

It is also worth noting that this “content targetted advertising” initiative moves Google even more firmly into competition with ad sellers inside traditional media (and or traditional media itself), since it will be competing head-to-head with the ad sales arms of the likes of NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and CNN.com right down to smaller outlets like Cleveland.com and Gazette.net/ All rely on well-paid teams of ad salespeople and expensive user profiling… will these be jettisoned for Google?