I got another rich ad from Google Adsense on FatMixx. These are clearly widgets, not just plain old rich ads.

Why is it a widget? Because you can embed it. Check the “Share” tab out:

In fact, I’ll embed it here:

Hopefully that works. That’s a great advertising model.

Update: Hmmm, the embed tag doesn’t work… wtf? I’ve checked the code again and I don’t think I embedded it incorrectly… anyone have any ideas?

Update 2: I see what might be wrong. Should be fixed in a sec.

Update 3: OK, so Wordpress bit me in the butt again… this time, the dynamic_replaces in the wptexturize function replaces the x in 300×250 (see the different x?). That value was in the URL, so that broke the URL and kept the embed from working. I hate these fancy replaces WordPress has, and may finally just give up and turn it off. I do like the extra typographical flourishes, though… Just wish it would detect whether it was in an HTML element or attribute or script block. I fixed this by replacing the x in the URL with %78, the urlencoded value for a lowercase x in utf-8.

Got it! Ads on FatMixx are showing the NBA’s playoff video “ad” again. I have some screenshots of what I was talking about earlier. It’s a little embedded interactive app. If you click on the controls, you can navigate to one of 4 features: Recap video, Preview video, Stat Leaders, and the Playoff schedule. If you click just in the window, you get taken to the NBA playoff package on NBA.com. Very slick, and great production values.

Here are the screenshots:

This is neat, but I wonder what the practical upshot is. Google Adsense as a Widget delivery vehicle? Is this content or advertising? Does it employ the same targeting algorithms? What keywords do you buy to deliver this ad? How much is the NBA paying? This is an interesting development.

Quick note: I was checking out NYC17’s comment on my “Why I Left ESPN.com” post below and saw something I hadn’t seen before: The square Google Ad placement before the comments was a video ad that let me watch highlights from last night’s Spurs game. I didn’t embed it, and it wasn’t a traditional ad (I didn’t get redirected to NBA.com or another site). I just got to navigate a menu and play back the highlight right there.

That’s a pretty cool setup. Ad as content…

Does anyone know anything more about this? The only thing I can find online (after a quick Google) are passing references in various Adsense Video coverage (which is different).

I wish I had taken a screenshot. I’ll grab one if I see it again.

I’ve made another random, silly WordPress plugin, this time a simple plugin to let me turn on and off ads on different posts from the post edit screen. I also can override the AdSense channels for each ad position without editing PHP code. In fact, this isn’t really even tied to the Google AdSense system, so you could literally use it to toggle anything on or off or change a value here or there. As a result, the integration isn’t ideal, and I’ve seen better plugins do some pretty clever things, so there’s some work left. If you’re looking for something simple, though, this might help.

Otherwise, you can check out what I think is the fully-featured solution in AdSense Deluxe written by some other guy. It looks really good, though it isn’t quite what I want (very close, though).

You can find the “official” page (and the download) for the plugin over here.