Here at NAB Europe I was talking to some of the guys from Google's Adsense for Audio. For those of you that don't know, this is their system that will sell and traffic radio stations from Google's bank of advertisers (and stemmed from their purchase of dMarc a couple of years ago).

They've mainly been operating in the US, having bought a chunk of airtime from ClearChannel stations alongisde their 'top-up' agreements with other broadcasters.

Chatting to the Google reps they said that they're looking to launch their system in Europe next year, with a focus first on the UK market. They're planning for a launch towards the end of 2008.

I think it's going to be an interesting system for UK broadcasters. Whilst the big groups, in theory, don't have much need for their services as they have direct relationships with national advertisers, I can see that smaller groups or digital-only stations could get real revenue benefit.

The other thing the reps mentioned were that they were due to re-start their deal selling airtime on the Sirius satellite radio stations.