NEWS
March 25, 2008
AdWords now in demographics flavor

For Google, AdWords has been all about the marriage of context and search. But now Google is rolling out a new component: demographics.

Google, which first began beta testing its demographic offerings in January with a select group of advertisers, has now opened up the product to all AdWords clients. Google announced the news on its AdWords blog.

While the service is only available with a handful of publishers -- YouTube and MySpace included -- Google said it believes the addition of demographics will help advertisers achieve greater targeting.

One interesting side note to Google's decision to embrace demographic targeting with AdWords could be its troubled relationship with MySpace. Google sells ads on MySpace as part of a $900 million overall deal with parent company Fox Interactive Media (FIM). While Google has made grumblings about finding social networks difficult to monetize, executives at FIM have publicly wondered if perhaps they couldn't get more money from Microsoft, which has been locking up ad deals left and right.