Google Adsense display-type ads?

It's more than a rumor...

[258cib]

From the website editorandpublisher.com for the newspaper industry I saw a display-type Adsense ad at the bottom 300x250 ad position. It runs in rotation with other ads.

I copied the link, but it disappeared. Anyone else seen this?

I can't over stress how vital this is to Google. Branding is where it's at in the ad business. With branding ads delivered in context, you can start playing some weird games in your marketing. (i.e., people who are reading about Microsoft are interested in expensive tennis shoes--we don't know why, and we don't care why, but we know it works.)

Kanoodle is working hard to develop a display-type contextual ad network, starting with "add you logo to your ad."

[jomaxx]

Hmm. Personally I think the text-only format is why AdSense works as well as it does.

Anyway, thankfully Google enforce minimum clickthrough rates, so getting paid nothing for advertisers' "branding" efforts is not as big a risk as with some other networks.