Google AdSense is just rolling out a new feature for AdSense publishers called AdSense Direct.

What is AdSense Direct?

In simple terms, AdSense Direct allows to sell your Ad inventory directly to advertisers interested in sponsoring Ads on your site. Now a question might arise in your mind. Aren’t we doing this already and what does AdSense direct has to offer?

Let me explain. Prior to this, if you plan to sell inventory to advertisers either you have to manually post ad code on your site given by your advertisers or host / rent an Ad serving solution where you have to configure and manage ads based on your advertiser campaigns. You may have to manually change Ad codes or manage Ads based on your implementation. There is also no fallback mechanism to start showing Adsense ads once the campaign is over.

How about leaving all this hassles to the leader in the Ad serving and largest Ad inventory in the world while still negotiate and sell Ads directly with your advertisers? You’ll get the best of both the worlds. That’s exactly what AdSense Direct is allowing us to do.

With AdSense direct all you have to do is create a campaign, choose a adsense unit where you want the ad to appear, select duration to show the ad and the price you want to charge & email the unique link generated for you to your advertiser and the rest (upload ad content, charge advertiser and all other ad management similar to Adwords) is taken care by Google.

Best of all, based on your previous adsense performance of ad units they even provide recommended cost estimates to charge your advertisers.

Once your advertiser uploads ad content and pays Google, Ad serving will start to show up on your site without any manual intervention. Once the campaign is over (for the duration you allowed your advertiser) automatically it switches over to serve Adsense Ads as usual. Again, no manual intervention is required. We don’t have to look for another advertiser to fill up the inventory. Cool huh?

How to Access AdSense Direct?

If AdSense direct is available for your AdSense account, you’ll find a notification (similar to the above image) on your AdSense home, click on Start now and start creating your AdSense direct campaign.

You may also click on My ads link on the top and look for the Direct campaigns option in the left navigation.

AdSense Direct Introduction Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUEzAozB5gw

So how much does this AdSense Direct cost you? Well although it is not directly called out, seems like Google shares 85% of the revenue with the publishers which means it’ll cost you 15% of the total revenue.

But here is the good news, thinking about the cost of Google scale Ad Serving infrastructure, collecting funds from Advertisers and distributing to publishers and the entire automation of this ad serving, this looks reasonable to me. If you can negotiate better rates with your advertiser then you may be able to recoup some of that cost.

With this AdSense Direct feature, Adsense becomes one of the best cloud based Ad serving solution at no cost to the publishers with fallback income always coming from Adsense serving.

What do you think of this AdSense Direct feature? Are you a site owner and are you planning to use this for your sites? Please share your thoughts through Google+ comments below.