ck37.com

Just got this email from Google's Inside-AdWords list:

Ever wish you could show your ads more often to a specific group like women aged 25-34? Want to see how your ads perform with certain demographic groups and then adjust your bids accordingly?

We're excited to introduce the new demographic bidding feature from AdWords. Demographic bidding helps you display your ads to specific gender and age group audiences on some sites in the Google content network, giving you more control over who your audience is and greater insight into how your ads perform with certain demographic groups.

Click here to sign up for the beta program. Note: the signup button seems to link to an internal hostname ("http://cfernando:8222/...") - not sure what the deal is here.

As someone who researches online advertising for youth voter registration... this could be amazing! The targeting data come from social networking sites, or other websites that collect demographic information from their users.

On the one hand this could be formidable competition for a Facebook-driven demographic advertising platform that was rumored to be in development, but on the other hand, it seems likely that Google sends a percentage of revenue from demographically-targeted ads to the site that provided the demographic data. If this is the case, Facebook could leverage its huge userbase for significant revenue potential. I suspected such a system was in the works back in mid-2007 when Facebook changed its login system to keep users permanently logged in, even across multiple sessions.