I’ve been beta-testing gmail.  Today I got my first sponsored links in an e-mail, which appeared unobtrusively to the right of my message.  I had received a message from someone with a few questions about non-qualified stock options and restricted stock and the like (my former life was as a corporate lawyer at a big law firm, so I am dogged by such questions; they’re picking up again, from friends, which suggests to me an entrepreneurial resurgence, but that’s another story…).  Here were the links I got, with formatting removed.  Pretty darn smart.

“Sponsored Links
 
Expensing Stock Options
Learn the true value of options for recording as an expense
www.valuationresearch.com 

ESOP Valuation
Duff & Phelps ERISA & ESOP transaction experts
www.duffllc.com 

ESOP Services, Inc.
Analysis, Feasibility Studies, Financing, Turnkey Implementation.
www.esopservices.com

Related Pages 

Lucent acquires Telica
The buy would improve its sales to telecommunication companies …
www.ciol.com 

Simmons First to buy back 5% of shares
PINE BLUFF, Ark. – Simmons First National Corp.’s board approved the …
www.bradenton.com“

I find also, upon review, that many though not all of the messages in my in-box have ads associated with them.  One, with Westport, CT in the sig of a sender of a forwarded message, is trying to sell me real estate in some expensive neighborhoods.  Another picks up on the name of a bank and offers a link to vault.com, the jobs and employment discussion site.  Nothing crazy.  Short messages with presumably no interesting keywords get no ads, which is interesting to me (i.e., there’s no sense that I have an “aggregated” profile that means that any e-mail generates a standard set of ads, but rather that ads are served in response to the content of specific e-mails).