This week I talked about Google’s Smart Pricing and its effects on publishers in comparison to Yahoo Publisher Network. My main concern was how Google’s Smart Pricing allegedly lumps an entire Adsense account together rather than judging each site seperately. I think this is an especially bad deal for publishers who own, buy, and sell content sites.

Besides that small issue, I have no doubt that smart pricing is a very good thing for advertisers and publishers.

The New York Times has a very good article about Google’s advertising techniques. If you are wondering why Yahoo seems to pay more, but gets fewer clicks than Adsense, read this article.

Besides demonstrating the huge competative advantage Google’s advertising algorithms give them over Yahoo, it also talks about Google’s future plans to conquer other advertising markets. Interestingly, the article mentions that Google is planning to deliver viewer-targetted advertising through television. I’m not suprised — I’ve actually been thinking about this myself lately. If the technology is here to deliver highly targetted television ads.. why not?

The article also covers privacy issues related to Google’s advertising system — and it makes a good case that Yahoo and Microsoft actually have worse privacy policies.

For every page that Google shows, more than 100 computers evaluate more than a million variables to choose the advertisements in its database to display - and they do it in milliseconds. The computers look at the amount bid and the budget of the advertiser, but they also consider the user - such as his or her location, which they try to infer by analyzing the user’s Internet connections - as well as the time of day and myriad other factors Google has tracked and analyzed from its experience with advertisements.