Nano2Sol by Marc Boucher

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.

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting (subscription required) that Microsoft has reached a $240 million deal with Facebook for a minority stake. It appears to have put a value of $15 billion on Facebook. The deal opens the way for Microsoft to start selling their ads to the approximately 50 million Facebook’s audience.

This is a huge deal for Microsoft and in my opinion levels the advertising playing field somewhat. Google which is dominating the online advertising segment, so it will be interesting to see how this affects in the long term. A lot depends on how Facebook develops and whether it can retain it’s audience, something I’m not 100% convinced of yet which may explain why Microsoft ultimately won this bidding war. Did Google sense something that made them offer a lower bid?