• by Shankar Gupta , May 1, 2006

The Web site of the Public Broadcasting Service quietly began accepting Google AdSense units this year.

PBS spokesman Kevin Dando confirmed to OnlineMediaDaily that the ads had been running for several months; the ads were first noted Friday by the Web site Paidcontent.org.

Dando added that the ads had attracted little attention; although PBS maintains a comment feature on the ads, they had garnered fewer than half a dozen comments, he said.

Previously, during the dot-com boom of the end of the last decade, PBS.org displayed banner ads, but stopped when the market crashed, Dando said. "In the late 90s, we had traditional banner ads for external companies, and then when the banner ad business kind of went south, we stopped doing it," he said.

The current Google ads only appear on a small proportion of pages, and never appear alongside content geared toward children, Dando said. He added that Google and PBS worked together to build a filtering system that took out ads inappropriate to PBS, including ads for pornography as well as alcohol and other adult products. Political ads are allowed.

Google and PBS did an ad deal before, with Google as the buyer and PBS the seller. In December 2005, PBS's NOVA featured a 15-second sponsorship spot promoting the search engine. The ads, which quietly launched at the end of summer 2005, start with the keywords "string theory," "Egyptology," and "astronomy" being typed into a search bar; as the terms are typed in, videos that relate to the subject appear behind the search bar. The spots end with the tagline: "Google is proud to support NOVA in the search for knowledge."