It’s been a busy week for advertising and mobile. First, Yahoo announces a new ad program for mobile, then Microsoft. AOL Mobile has offered keyword ads for a while. Now, are we seeing Google testing ads on Google Mobile in the U.S.? Tonight, we started noticing one ad at the top of some Google Mobile results pages and in some cases one ad at both the top and bottom of a results page. They are clearly marked [AD]. We were unable to reproduce the results by using the mobile web site on a regular web browser so a few screen caps follow below.

About a month ago, Barry “Rustybrick” Schwartz posted about mobile ad testing underway in the U.S., U.K., and Germany. We also know both via Google Blogoscoped and Google PR that mobile ad testing is happening in Japan.

Here in the U.S., we asked a few friends to check their mobile browsers at: http://www.google.com/xhtml but they saw no ads on results page. So, once again another Google UI test? UI tests are something Google is famous for and at the same time a good way to keep the “buzz” going.

The following screen caps were taken from my mobile browser between 8:30 and 9:30pm EDST on Monday night.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 12:37 am and is filed under Web Search, Wireless Web and Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.