The web site of the Public Broadcasting Service quietly began accepting Google AdSense units this year.

PBS spokesman Kevin Dando confirmed to OnlineMediaDaily that the ads had been running for several months; the ads were first noted Friday by the Web site Paidcontent.org.

Dando added that the ads had attracted little attention; although PBS maintains a comment feature on the ads, they had garnered fewer than half a dozen comments, he said.

Previously, during the dot-com boom of the end of the last decade, PBS.org displayed banner ads, but stopped when the market crashed, Dando said. "In the late 90s, we had traditional banner ads for external companies, and then when the banner ad business kind of went south, we stopped doing it," he said.

Read more about PBS serving Google ads at http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=42804.