I am not kidding with you. Google is actually experimenting with being some sort of brokerage house for advertisers to put ads in magazines. A C|Net article released this morning named Google takes ad sales to print describes this in detail.
Google recently began buying ad pages in technology magazines, including PC Magazine and Maximum PC, and reselling those pages--cut into quarters or fifths--to small advertisers that already belong to its online ad network, dubbed AdWords.
I knew about this for days, when Elinor Mills asked me for my thoughts on it, here is the small portion she used to quote me.
"All the big talk today is how the inventory available for PPC (pay per click) ads is shrinking each day," Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Roundtable, wrote in an e-mail. "So it does make sense for Google to look for ways to increase that inventory."
Some revealing URL; http://www.adsbygoogle.com/pcmag and http://www.adsbygoogle.com/maxpc/.
Some other tidbits I looked into while verifying this are. I did look to make sure Google owns adsbygoogle.com and as you can see by the Whois Record http://whois.sc/adsbygoogle.com Google does own it. But it seems its brand new... No links to it (according to Yahoo). Google finds no mention of the site anywhere else or links to it as well. That is pre-release of this article. Some screen captures of the adsbygoogle pages, here and here.
I posted a thread at Search Engine Watch Forums (which is a tad slow right now).
