Today on the Official Google Blog, Google announced the soft launch of Ad Manager an online service that will host and manage your online ad sales. And it's free.
The service is in Beta mode right now and open by invitation only. The service provides publishers the ability sell, schedule, deliver and measure their directly-sold and network-based ad inventor. You can integrate Google AdSense and other ad networks as well.
From a small business perspective this offers a hassle free quick way to start selling your own inventory at the rates you want and maximizing your ad profits. If you have unsold inventory you can allow Google to compete for that inventory with other ad networks you specify and whoever provides the highest bid gets the inventory. And with the acquisition of DoubleClick you' ll see Google eventually trying to fill that space with either AdSense or DoubleClick, that is of course if they don't get outbid by another network. This is good situation for any publisher to be in. You sell as much inventory on your as you can, that way you get the highest cost per thousand ads (CPM) or allow Google to sell it for you knowing they or the other networks will take their cut and dilute your CPM.
I've signed up for the beta program for the SpaceRef network and hope to hear back in a few weeks if we get in. I'll keep my audience posted should anything come of this.
So what do I use right now? For several years now SpaceRef has been using OpenAds, now OpenX, an open source platform, and while it has been a good product I've noticed recently that they've been trying to do too much with it. In fact we're running two versions of the program right now. We had wanted to upgrade to one of the newer versions but it's so buggy that it makes is almost impossible to use. So with OpenX in transition yet again, I find myself eager to try Google's new Ad Manager. With the inventory of several million adviews available each month I need a long term viable solution, perhaps Google Ad Manager could be it.