Google has just launched another service that solidifies it’s position as the online advertising leader and cuts directly into the developing market of ad inventory mangers…

Welcome to Ad Manager: “Google Ad Manager is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory.”

In other words, Ad Manger allows small to medium sized publishers and affiliates to manage ad space on their sites or blogs in order to serve ads. So, instead of turning to solutions such as the popular OpenX self hosted solution (you have to install OpenX on your own server and configure it to work with your site although there is a hosted solution coming), the growing PubMatic platform as well as smaller more affiliate-centric platforms like ShowYourAdHere.com (which is what I’ve been using for ReveNews and CostPerNews and have been recommending).

Inevitably, Google will suck a great deal of oxygen out of the ad management game when they open up the program to everyone (still in private beta). However, sites like PubMatic and ShowYourAdHere are nimble enough and diverse enough to offer not only competing services to Google, but will be able to provide more features in order to stay in the market.

It’s amazing to me how quickly this space has developed given the market need for an easy-to-use hosted solution for ad serving. More and more content creators are getting to the point where they’d like to monetize their sites or blogs yet don’t have the time/skills needed to optimize OpenX for their sites. I’m glad to see Google get into the game because I do think it will only encourage evolution in the ad management space by the smaller companies who want to compete.

You can read more about this over on TechCrunch and CNet as well as the article that broke the news at the WSJ.