From what I know of the product, their offering seems best suited for websites trying to maximize their adsense revenue. It's not going to match OpenX, nor the functionality that a Rubicon can offer.

• Posted by: Ted Rheingold
• March 13, 2008 9:42 AM

Same question ...

May be because Ad Manager was in dev before they though to buy DC ?

Google says:
- Ad Manager for small and medium publishers (free)
- DC for big publishers (not free)

In near future, there will be only one!

• Posted by: Pascal
• March 13, 2008 9:52 AM

My main question in all this is still: Is this proposed new form of advertising relevance-based?

From the WSJ article:

"The Ad Manager service will handle formats including graphical display, video and text ads."

And from Google's "10 Things" Corporate Philosophy:

"Advertising on the site must offer relevant content and not be a distraction." AND "Google firmly believes that ads can provide useful information if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find."

Frankly, these days I am seeing more and more graphical ads by Google (on Facebook for example) that have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the page, and even less to do with what is relevant to me, what I wish to find.

Is that it? Is the idealistic Google from ten years ago now officially dead and gone forever? Is the dream over?

• Posted by: JG
• March 13, 2008 12:00 PM

Ad Manager for small and medium publishers (free)
- DC for big publishers (not free)

In near future, there will be only one!

• Posted by: sove
• March 13, 2008 2:31 PM

I imagine that small-midsize publishers will flock to this if it is anything more than a marginal improvement over the mindbending annoyance and confusion that is the OpenAds/OpenX admin panel.

• Posted by: Joseph
• March 13, 2008 6:49 PM

Google has reached out to publishers since announcing their plan to acquire DBLCK and offered this free service. Think ad serving will quickly become a commodity and the paid services for publishers will be focused around behaviorial, ad optimization, interfaces with agencies, etc.

Ultimately, Doubleclick's core business today will not be the revenue engine for Google...

• Posted by: Pete
• March 14, 2008 11:28 AM

Oh no, that means Publishers will actually have to be held accountable for the impressions they claim if they're charging on a CPD basis. All this valuable data on Google's servers and not your own? That spells transparency, and who wants that? =P I'd have to add that Ad Manager also seems to be targeting all of Adify's Networks. A sad day, truly. Seriously folks, did anybody not see this coming especially from Google? Hell, there are tons of WP plugins that do this type of management now. Even Flashloaded's BannerRotator program was available to the public long before this. I do agree with JG that OpenX's admin panel is a bit clunky. But at least they have a great community backing it, which is hard to say of Google. Support ticket, anybody? Ha!

• Posted by: mike
• March 14, 2008 1:47 PM

Google takes it all :p
As Openx got better, they become assertive in the ad sector. But i'm not sure if it'll be all free.

• Posted by: prefabrik
• March 15, 2008 3:21 PM

Will this be a hit with publishers or not? I think so

• Posted by: benny
• March 16, 2008 10:30 AM

I signed up for a trial account to see what it was like.

I'm sure quite a few people will start using it, but those of us who are a bit tired of Google's pervasiveness might stick to using OpenX. The other thing to bear in mind is stability. When Google made Urchin into a free service the stability was deplorable. Who is to say the same thing wouldn't happen with this service?

They have a terrible track record of not investing resources in the companies / products / services they acquire. Jaiku's offline again today for example

Michele

• Posted by: Michele
• March 17, 2008 7:00 AM