Google knows a lot about you and I, some would day too much.
Now Google wants to know more, more about the metrics for advertisements in ad networks other then Google AdWord/AdSense.

Google new Ad Manager is a much needed solution for publishers who run ads from multiple networks on their sites, now Google Ad Manager will “optimize” the network of networks so that it will serve those campaigns with the highest CPM.  Before Ad Manager publishers had to do this optimization manually or deploy OpenX, a very robust application, or rely on a handful of vendors that provided half-backed solution on a SaaS basis.

Small and medium publishers did not have the time, knowledge, experience, expertise, bandwidth, and talent to deploy and maintain OpenX, and now will be adopting Ad Managers in droves.  The benefits are clear: simplicity a’ la Google, and integration of AdSense, Analytics, and Ad Manager, optimizing for the highest CPM.

Quite interesting.

What if you are an advertiser?  Today the long tail effect and the dominance of Google AdWord network played in favor of advertisers. Small publishers signed up for Google AsSense and served a modest amount of ads on an individual basis (the tail), but an enormous amount as an aggregate, with Google collecting a piece of that action by collecting the pie from the advertisers and sharing a few slices with the publishers.
Tomorrow, once Ad Manager becomes more pervasive (just a few clicks of the mouse), advertisers will see that their campaigns will not achieve the budgeted impressions, and surely their Google AdWord reports will show them that they were outbid for the same keywords by competing advertisers on non-Google networks, but – of course – just adjusting the bid upward will take care of it, now Mr. Advertiser you can be sure that your campaign will achieve the impressions that you need, and we, Google, will monitor the publishers and their advertisers to make sure that it happens, and in the case you get overbid, again, will let you know and you can up the ante, again.

In a nutshell: the cost to advertisers went up.  And up and up it goes.

But it will be elastic only for Google’s clients, since advertisers on the  “other” networks can increase their bids in order to maintain traffic, their networks will not be monitor what’s going on in the AdWords world, only Google sees the fluctuations up and down of the bids for keywords, and only Google can adjust the bid up and down, effectively following the market, making sure that spike are spikes, and not stepping stones.

Will the Street pick on this?  Will the stock go up tomorrow?

At the end of the day this is Economics 101, Google is bringing transparency of pricing into the marketplace at large.  It was doomed to hapen sooner or later.  And like Tech Crunch says, this makes OpenX a very appetizing morsel in the M&A marketplace, who will eat it up first, Microsoft or Yahoo?

Take a tour of Google Ad Manager.