And you thought the only ads for sale on eBay were for placement on foreheads and naughty bits. Not for long: on March 14 political advertisers and vendors will be able to bid on PoliticsOnline newsletter ads.

Through its PoliTicker and NetPulse email newsletters, PoliticsOnline has been covering all things politically interactive for quite some time now (seems like it must be at least two or three years). Although the media company doubles as a consultancy and Web tool provider, it hired campaign management and web marketing services firm CampaignAssistant to handle its eBay auction service which will offer ad space in the newsletters. It looks like CampaignAssistant has a service called "MarketRates Advertising" that sells and implements ads on websites, email newsletters, blogs, and print mags or newsletters.

As someone who's followed the online ad industry for...sheesh...about 7 years now...I've gotta say I'm surprised to see an ad space auction originate in the political ad sphere. Typically, political advertisers lag years behind corporate marketers.

This is an interesting addition to the growing array of ad revenue options for small publishers such as BlogAds, Burst Media or Google AdSense. I guess it's also another nail in the micropayments coffin. I'm interested to know whether other publishers have signed on and whether people will be comfortable buying ad space this way.

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