With Google’s stock price dropping and investors increasingly nervous about the effects of a recession on the search giant, Google has begun to monetize parts of its network of sites that previously had not seen ads.

YouTube rolled out “sponsored videos,” AdWords began using images in ads, gambling ads are now allowed in the UK, along with beer ads in the USA, and Google Maps also introduced sponsored results.

Now, Google Finance is pumping out ads, with Google News soon to follow. According to the Google Blog…

…in the very near future, we will start testing text ads on a small number of news refinements within Google Search — so if, for example, you type “iPod” into Google.com and then click on the news link on the upper left-hand side, you might see text ads alongside those results.

One can hardly believe that Google had any intention of keeping these sites virgin forever, so what better time to roll out the ads than right now? With the stock under $300 a share and new revenue possibilities in their back pocket, what better time than the present to make the move?

It’s not known how long it will take until Google starts advertising black market kidney dealers on Google Health.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 6:22 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.