I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map!
I am sensing a trend.
In October TechCrunch noticed that Google had turned on text ads in Google Maps.
In January Matt McGee and Greg Sterling noted that Google had introduced some nifty new advertiser features for Google Maps.
In February Mike Blumenthal discovered that Google had started showing ads within the listing tab.
This makes perfect sense, particularly as Google tries to monetize high bandwidth applications. Not sure what the deal is on these but I am betting that the ecpm off of these is a lot better than your typical adsense for content deal.
Anyone else see these out in the wild?
Note to Google Maps Team: You may want to tweak the targeting a bit. Not sure how many people are looking for Myrtle Beach hotels in Menlo Park 🙂
2 Response Comments
In mid March, Google announced that they have changed the API to allow the hosting site show ads along with searches for local businesses performed through the API.
I think that is what you are seeing at MC.
As usual Mike you are way ahead of me. Perhaps I will check my feedreader a bit more often in the future.