Ariel Schneller, a professional poker player who claims to have won $182,000 in a single weekend, has bought a television commercial to promote his website. This is Google's fault.

No, really. Schneller says he was able to buy cut-rate advertising time for FoxwoodFiends.com through Google's experimental TV-advertising auction. He spent $500 to reach 330,000 Dish Network subscribers tuned in to the Oxygen, ESPN2, or WPT channels.

I'll do the math: That's $1.50 per thousand viewers, which is a quarter what a cable-television ad should cost. Thanks, Google! Your doomed foray into television-advertising will simultaneously destroy the economics of an entire industry and expose us to a whole new generation of opportunistic douchebags. I weep for the future.

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