8-O Excuse the long comment, but...<p>I'm a producer on a scrappy little TV show (local, trying to expand). This is startling, because I just finished work on a business plan today and our business model is produce show, sell ad spots direct to likely candidates, and buy airtime to increase reach.<p>I'm really not sure how I feel about this. I may be able to use it (particularly to use the pricing estimates to reverse-engineer the viewership revenue possibilities for TV show in the genre I'm producing, as well as to identify which slots are most effective - Nielsen already produces such data, but it costs a fortune), but it's also very tough on me as a producer because I don't have a network deal of any kind; furthermore it makes me much more dependent on a network owner while cutting me out of the loop completely as a content creator, strongly reinforcing the position of the distributor (not unlike how your iPhone app doesn't exist for commercial purposes if you're not in the app store). I applaud Google for automating the ad-buying process, and I presume that due to their sheer size they'll be able to secure very good terms and make profits on relatively small margins. But our existing plan of generating maybe $2m/yr in direct sponsorship sales 2 years from now is probably in the toilet, because if I were an advertiser it would probably be vastly simpler to just use this new tool and have a dashboard with analytics and so forth than to do special deals with niche content providers (like us).<p>It's not going to disrupt the TV/advertising business overnight, of course, but this is going to be the talk of the industry over the next 72 hours. I have to say I feel like I just got sucker-punched. It doesn't help that my boss is an old-school ad guy who finds Google docs mysterious.<p>(Strangely, the 'ad creation marketplace' (hook up with a producer/camera team) goes to a dead link. Mini-fail, there.)