Peter Kafka at All Things Digital’s MediaMemo is reporting about a startup focused on advertising from the CAPTCHA. Solve Media aims to take a web element, which already requires user attention (the CAPTCHA) and monetize it through advertising. 

It’s really not a bad idea, but it’s not exactly a new one either. We’ve seen examples of this in the past, though I can’t honestly say I’ve encountered it much in everyday web browsing. 

Google announced today that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to over 100,000 sites around the web.

Perhaps you’re thinking that Google was inspired by a patent recently granted to Microsoft for advertising via the CAPTCHA. Maybe Google will be the first to offer AdWords in CAPTCHAs. Maybe "relevant" CAPTCHA text.

This story relates to Google, and also to a month-to-month increase of around 100 percent.  It can hardly be considered positive, however, since the increase corresponds to spam sent from Gmail addresses.