CNET: Google to sell banner ads

While not allowing them on its flagship Google site, the search giant is offering banner ad spots in its AdSense advertising network, where publishers decide to join the new, experimental program. Four of the most popular Interactive Advertising Bureau sizes - banners, leaderboards, inline rectangles and skyscrapers - were opened up for submission. The move could open up AdSense to budgets from larger, more established online media buying accounts that traditionally placed their own media with sales reps for big swathes of banner inventory.

The creative specifications are strict however, disallowing rich media or even basic animation. Google seems to have planned for this move, with its text ad box size chosen to be precisely the same pixel height of a banner and pixel width of a skyscraper. That foresight makes site modification to incorporate banners quite simple.

Interesting to Googlologists, a Google spokesperson was quoted in The New York Times as saying that Google wasn't opposed to putting display ads on its own site, although it had no current plans to do so. A ClickZ story quoted another executive as being less coy, indicating it was extremely unlikely.