AdSense Can Make More Money

I was reading through some of my feeds, and saw the post What Would Google Do. In the feed was a Google AdSense ad. The post was short and therefore void of rich context (AdSense of course relies on page context only in order to determine ad targeting), and since the post was about Google they obviously picked that keyword for ad targeting.

The ad was for AdSense (see below). I found it humorous that Google is advertising AdSense through AdSense. I wonder how much they have to pay themselves (and their publisher) if I click? ;-)

But then I began to think about how much more money Google could make by utilizing behavioral targeting within AdSense. They'd know I was already an AdSense publisher (rendering their current choice of ad useless). They'd probably be able to summarize the information I've historically read from Fred's blog -- heck, from most the blogs I read. And they'd even know what I've been writing about in my own blog, email, etc.

Google has access to so much attention data -- what each of us are paying attention to on the Web. But they only utilize the current page I'm looking at for targeting. I'd argue the path is much more important than the page, and targeting ME is more effective than targeting static content. The page will never change -- my attention span is always changing, and within the patterns of my attention span you can find what I care about most. If AdSense were to harness that, particularly on pages with poor or no relevant context (like social networking sites), AdSense could make a lot more money.