Here come the Gadget Ads

Basically anything that you can build on a web-page can now appear inside your ads that show up on the AdSense network. This includes things like flash ads, video ads, real-time feeds, and transactional functionality.

This is definitely the future, and is a great leap forward for Google & the industry (the other big 3 search engines will no doubt be not far behind).

However, just as we saw last week, when a few AdWords ads led to nasty sites - expect the potential difficulties to multiply. If an ad includes 1000 possible options inside it, via drop-down boxes or the like, is a Google staff-member going to test each one to make sure nothing nasty happens? And what if the ad pulls in content from elsewhere?

Fingers-crossed that nasty sites don't decide that paying for traffic can be profitable!