SmoothSpan Blog

I started noticing more and more Google ads on the individual blog posts in Google reader.  At first I thought it was the blogs themselves with the ads, but when the ads appeared first and the post second, I got suspicious.  Sure enough, it’s Google Reader doing the ads.

I’m seeing all kinds of ads from the minimalist text ads to big banner ads of fat bellies:

Google's Fat Belly Ads

I guess times is tough all over!  These ads don’t even seem particularly well targeted for this TechCrunch article about YCombinator’s ReMail.  Maybe it isn’t Google injecting them into the RSS feed, but they are all “Ads by Google”, so I’m suspicious.

The one I can’t figure out is YouTube.  Here they are milking Google Reader for all it’s worth, and there is much complaining about the profitability of YouTube, but they don’t seem to do much to advertise at all there.  I am on YouTube all the time looking at videos that are commercially related.  Take my hobby of CNC machine tools, for example.  Type “CNC” into YouTube and there are a ton of videos, most of them manufacturer’s demonstrations.  Almost no ads.  Now go to Google proper and type “CNC”.  Tons of ads.  It makes sense to me that YouTube is expensive to run.  I’ve uploaded hundreds of megs of video there for free, and who nows how much bandwidth I’ve sucked out watching vids.  But hey guys, you gotta play to win and you’re not serving much in the way of ads.  That part makes no sense and seems incredibly easy to fix.

Why the heck aren’t they trying harder on something that costs so much?  Maybe it’d mean less fat belly ads on Google Reader.