In early 2003, I started using Google AdSense. The first day, I made $5 and was ecstatic. Then, in less than 18 months, I was cashing $130,000 checks per month on the same site. Google AdSense is an amazing and innovative product. For those unfamiliar with the application, it simply displays ads on your site based on the text found on each page. When people click on one of these ads, you receive a percentage of the revenue, rumored to be somewhere around 80 percent. Overall, that’s a very low fee for the service provided. And, there are other positives to running AdSense — it relieves the pressure and headaches associated with trying to sell ad space, collect advertising revenue and manage your own in-house server and software. But most people stop there. Satisfied with the little taste of success that Google has given them, they never stop to consider the negatives associated with using AdSense. Editorial Control By far, the biggest downside to AdSense is the lack of editorial control. There are very few options to block advertisements and advertisers you might find inappropriate. For example, one of my wife’s friends in rural Nebraska sells a very rare and expensive breed of dog — Kerry Blue Terriers.

As soon as she began running Google AdSense on her website, she started receiving hate mail from her users. They accused her of making money from people who sell fighting dogs. She was very confused. The only ads she ever saw were for dog collars, leashes and typical pet products. Since AdSense allows for geographic and site targeting, some users located in certain cities encountered the offensive ads that she never even saw. Ultimately, this damaged the overall trust she had built with her readers over the course of many years. One Click and Gone With AdSense, the only way you make money is when people leave your website. In my opinion, this is not a smart plan. You have worked hard to get users to your website and to establish trust with them. Now you are willing to send them to your competition for a few pennies? Also, when a user clicks on an AdSense ad, a new window does not open. That means if a user finds this new advertising page offensive, useless or not what was expected, they’ll close the window. That’s it — they’re gone. WebSite Magazine

Back in March, we announced the beta release of Google Ad Manager, our hosted ad serving and management solution for publishers with smaller direct sales teams. Today, we are pleased to announce general availability of the product -- no invitation required! Thousands of publishers in hundreds of countries already serve billions of impressions each day with Ad Manager, and we've heard from them that Ad Manager has helped increase revenue, cut serving costs, and save time managing campaigns.

Now we're excited to bring those benefits to all publishers. If you have an AdSense account, you can sign in to Ad Manager today. If not, apply for an AdSense account now. A Google AdSense account is a technical requirement for creating an Ad Manager account.

Ad Manager can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure both directly-sold and network-based inventory. It offers an intuitive and simple user interface, Google serving speed and reliability, and significant cost savings. Best of all, Ad Manager can be optionally integrated with Google AdSense to offer you an automated way to maximize the revenue of your unsold and network-managed inventory.

We've been busy since March; in addition to supporting thousands of new publishers on Ad Manager, we've been adding new features including:

• Interface available in 32 languages: Do you prefer to work in Turkish or Vietnamese or Hungarian? Now you can! Ad Manager supports international currencies, too.
  
• Ad network management: Easily manage your third-party ad networks in Ad Manager to automatically maximize your network driven revenue.
  
• Automatic macro insertion: Save time and avoid tagging errors since Ad Manager now automatically detects and inserts macros from most popular 3rd party vendors.
  
• Creative preview on live site: Preview the look and feel of ads on your live site to ensure ads look as expected before you start the campaign.
  
• Day and Time Targeting: Don't want your orders to run on weekends? No problem. With day and time targeting, you can set any new line items you create to run only during specific hours or days, or as little as 15 minutes per week. Use day and time targeting in addition to geography, bandwidth, browser, user language, operating system, domain and custom targeting.
  

We also continue to roll out new features for the DoubleClick Revenue Center suite of publisher solutions, including DART for Publishers (DFP), our ad serving platform for publishers with larger direct sales teams. Google Ad Manager serves as an effective complement to the DoubleClick Revenue Center by providing new opportunities for publishers of all sizes.

If you have any additional questions about Ad Manager or want to learn more, visit the Ad Manager Help Center.

Posted by Alex Vogenthaler - Product Manager, Google Ad Manager Original Post Here