Google AdSense adds "Advertise on this site"?

By an amazing coincidence, my colleague Tim Carter just told me that he's in a beta program from Google that is exactly what you're asking me about. Go to Ask The Builder.com and you'll see an interesting new link on the Google AdSense block on his busy site:

Can you see the link here? Advertise on this site is something that's actually added by Google itself when the advertisement is served up.

Now, click on it and here's what you see, served up by Google, not Tim's site:

Click for full size image

You might be thinking that this isn't really much of a big deal, but I think it's quite significant, actually, for two reasons: one, it demonstrates that the Google AdWords system is being extended to allow advertisers to bid on specific Web sites.

This also bridges a very important gap in the AdWords program because it finally lets potential advertisers who see a group of AdSense advertisements how they can be included. Sophisticated online advertisers scoff at this because they can already recognize an AdSense block at 100 paces, but the majority of potential online advertisers are lost and find the complexity of bidding and advertising in a pay-per-click (PPC) world hopelessly baffling. For those people, it's been too difficult to connect the dots between seeing a site like Ask The Builder.com (or even Ask Dave Taylor) and knowing how your product or service could be advertised on the site.

This is very exciting news for those of us involved in the AdSense / AdWords world, and I'm looking forward to Google making it more pervasive. Stay tuned, this is going to change the very face of online advertising.