Google just announced the launch of Google Ad Manager, which is a FREE ad management tool with all the built in optimization and tracking functions you need in an ad server. This is a HUGE step from Google as they are offering an ad management and serving platform free of charge, which is at the moment a very hot product to offer.
Google Ad Manager allows you to sell ads directly to advertisers, and you can even default to adsense if you do not have an advertiser for a particular niche or domain. So you are now in control over what ads are displayed on your sites.
I have been using the OpenAds ad serving platform for some time now, which is a free open source development project. It is quite good but pretty cumbersome to use. But does server its purpose well. There are many other paid alternatives of course, but these could be at risk now that Google is offering it for free!
It is a very smart move from Google. Not only will they grab a lot of the ad serving market share, but they will have in depth access into all the statistics which they can then use to spy on the advertising industry for their own benefit. After their recent acquisition of DoubleClick, which served about 60% of all ads displayed on Internet, Google will now have a pretty scary monopoly on the online ad serving market (also affiliate and private labeled ads).
It will be interesting to see if the advertising industry is willing to share this data with Google.
Edit: Shoemoney made a great post also on this topic worth the read.
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