Thinking about Google’s new Ad Manager product. (It doesn’t look bad, from the tour. But it’s not hard not to look bad, given most adservers’ tore-up UI.) I’ve also been thinking about Josh Chasin recent article on conflicts of interest in advertising measurement and delivery. And I’ve also been thinking about public companies in general and the pressures to generate revenue. Primarily my unease comes from AdSense’s unknown and potentially variable revenue share – any company that optimizes between remnant monetization services, is the provider of one of the monetization services, and opaquely controls the payout from that monetization service faces some severe temptations.
UPDATE: Scott Switzer at OpenX says the same thing, more bluntly.
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It’s clear that Google’s position and time/effort invested to date in getting thousands upon thousands of publishers to sign up (not to mention their 40,000 servers running Adsense!) will stand them in good stead here…. free sells, uptime sells, simplicity helps etc. etc.
I would love to think of the ability to write to an API and push stuff into the Ad Manager etc. but I am very skeptical of the extent to which that will happen. What do you think, Greg – I think given your position you should have a great perspective on “openness”, APIs and the like?