Google’s Backdoor to Global Ad Domination

Google has released the Google Ad Manager. It’s interesting to see that they are announcing it just after their Doubleclick Acquisition closed, because in a sense, they are competing with Doubleclick for Publishers (dfp). Of course, Google’s offering is free and based on the feature list, it is very powerful for a first release. I am currently running OpenX here and just submitted a request for access, which I double I will get for blog.thylmann.net as I wasn’t able to tell them more about me. The New York Times has a nice article about what the Ad Manager is about for those not fully aware to what the ad serving market looks like.

I’d like to add one very important thing though. This is really a way to get to see more pages users view. Each page the Ad Manager is on, independent of whether Google is serving AdSense ads or not, will ping Google about the user information based on Cookies. That is a very important thing because you need to know as much as possible about surfing behaviour of people, and at the moment Yahoo!, and sepecially Microhoo, see people more often. It is not only about how many people you see, but how often you see them. Do I see 3% of their surfing behaviour or 20%. HUGE difference for targeting systems.

The interesting thing is that the system will automatically try to make you most money. So if you do not book an ad with a fixed amount of Ad Impressions to be served, Google will optimize everything. I currently don’t know, and rather don’t believe, if this will include CPL/CPO ads, in which case the system would be amazing for publishers, also bigger ones, which are missing a solution like that.

This will become one of the biggest if not the biggest ad server in a short time frame. It will be interesting to see what OpenX does with their hosted version once it is out.