Google's TV-ad system: everyone's a player

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Valleywag has the story of Ariel Schneller, a 24-year-old Internet poker player who placed the homemade commercial above, which advertises his FoxwoodsFiend.com blog, in front of 330,000 Dish subscribers for just $500, thanks to Google's nascent TV-ad-buying program. Schneller explains that his roommate works for Google in its ads division and tipped him off to how easy the whole process could be. "It's half egomania and half dedication to comedy," he says of the commercial, which ran on Oxygen, ESPN2, and WPT. Maybe slightly more of the former than the latter.

—Posted by Tim Nudd