OpenDNS rocking $7.3 million per year on a free, but not open, service

What's a fairly dull service yet manages to pull in $20,000 each day by serving up ads? No, it's not Google, but it's one of those services that make me say, "Dang! I wish I would have thought of that!"

It's OpenDNS. It's a service that speeds up browsing while protecting its users from phishing and other malware sites.

Despite the name, no, OpenDNS is not open source. It's the kind of service, however, that doesn't rely on proprietary source. OpenDNS makes money by serving up ads. More pertinently to open source, it leverages community to improve the service:

OpenDNS also uses their community to drive new features and tag new malware sites. Users submit ideas and vote on them in a Digg-like interface. And when a user blacklists a site and tags it with a category, other users are asked to verify. If they do, the site is added to the general category blacklist as well.

It's not open source, as I said, and, frankly, I'm not sure how open source would help drive this particular business. OpenDNS is a sign of our "open" times: The code is not always open, but the process increasingly is. Everyone seems to be experimenting with the principles that have made open source so successful.

OpenDNS' experiment? It's currently worth $7.3 million in revenue.

[mhinnewyork]

For more about what OpenDNS does and why you might want to use it see:

OpenDNS provides added safety for free
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13554_1-9834579-33.html

[tristanbob]

I really love the OpenDNS service. At first it just prevented phishing attacks and a fast DNS server. Now they have added web-content filtering which I use to protect my family network from visiting mature websites. You simply create an account and choose the catagories you want blocked. You can even whitelist or blacklist specific sites.

I highly recommend OpenDNS for every home network. You never see ads unless you try visit a non-existant domain, for example www.asdlkfjsldfkjlk.com.

[David_Ulevitch]

Just to clarify any misconceptions... Your math is a bit naive and that big number is wildly inaccurate. It'd be nice if it were true.

If you want to write a real story about the interesting stuff we're doing with regards to being open with the community, opening our product roadmap and developing the services and features our users want, we'd love the opportunity to tell you about it.