This is huge– ok, perhaps overstating, but remember, search ads are a 1.5 billion dollar business and the following extends Google in the general ad space alongside companies like DoubleClick. The first signs of what the Google/Blogger combination will yield are shown with Google’s latest Adwords initiative.
Google has just launched adverts which are based upon the content of a web page, for an example see the old Industry Standard website.
This is a major new direction for Google since it extends their main revenue source from adverts on their own and affiliated search sites to any website. It also marks a trend away from the banner ad – in fact web advertising will increasingly consist of targeted text advertising and rich media adverts.
The key to the targeted ads is that they change according to the content of the page (Google continually spiders the pages and serves different ads based upon what it has spidered and indexed), in other words they are perfect for sites with dynamic content – and this is where weblogs come in.
If you look at the adverts on Blogspot you will see that as of now, they are also based upon the content of the page. Because Google owns Blogger, they can index the pages in real time and thus target ads immediately there is a new posting.
Three things are missing to make this a killer app:
1. The ads should be targeted at the level of the posting as opposed to the page, then they could be served inline even when syndicated via RSS aggregators.
2. As Dave Winer has suggested, Google should look at pings to weblogs.com to allow real-time targeted ads for users of other tools such as Userland and Moveable Type.
3. The Google indexing engine needs to detect tone in the context of a keyword mention. For example neither the advertiser nor the Blogger would want adverts for SUV’s appearing on an environmental site that has a posting against gas guzzling cars.