This new triangle in the online advertising world raises a few interesting questions about how the 3 of them will fall in place and position themselves.
It is well-known that the majority of very large content owners do not use Google’s AdSense program as their primary monetization source. In most cases, the publishers’ salesforce is able to sell ad space at quite high CPMs, and AdSense would be employed for those hard-to-sell, low-performance ad slots.
Google AdManager is built around AdSense and greatly facilitates the use of AdSense as a backup for the remnant inventory, making it obvious that Google’s goal was to gain access to premium placements.
However, it is unclear whether DoubleClick will be developed in the future to better support Google AdSense. Currently, one can traffic Google ads through DoubleClick’s DART for Publishers (DFP) but the two aren’t integrated in any way. This makes forecasting and reporting a nightmare and certainly works against AdSense. One would expect a quick integration between the two but there is are no signs of it happening yet.
I think it would make sense for Google to better position AdSense into DFP and gain even more access to premium placements of truly large publishers, but ultimately it goes down to the plans of positioning AdManager and DoubleClick on the ad serving market.
