I picked this interesting piece of news up at Perclickforums, which is from an original post over on John Chows blog. A few key points from the post;

Recently, Google started a new ad network but is not telling anyone about it – the Google Display Advertising Network. The Google Display Advertising Network was created so Google can go after Fortune 1000 companies, which buy advertising to build a brand more than to sell a product.

Google has been hand-selecting sites (no word on how many sites has been chosen) that they want to put in front of Fortune 1000 companies. The goal being to sell these big companies display and video ads at a very high CPM – unlike the AdSense network, the display network is 100% CPM based.

Never heard of it before right?

How do you join the Google Display Advertising Network? You can’t. Google won’t even acknowledge it exists. You won’t find anything written about it in any of Google’s web properties. The only way to get into the display network is if Google invites you, which is how I found out about it.

Surely the publishers get a bigger cut then?

While Google won’t tell normal AdSense publishers what the revenue split on their account is, they are much more open with the display network. As a matter fact, every display network members negotiates a flat CPM rate with Google.

I guess it was only a matter of time before Google really pushed the whole display & media market. Video Ads are almost too small for the really big companies who would traditionally be looking at such media negotiations on much larger scale.