Openads just changed its name to OpenX. OpenadsX is one of my top open-source software picks, given its potential to roil the ad server business. With its competitors (like DoubleClick/Google) taking 40 percent to 50 percent of a Web site's advertising revenue, the company's model of charging peanuts to advertisers to source publishers is a big boon to content publishers, 30,000 of which have signed up to use OpenX.
But after talking with publishers, Openads decided that it could provide more value than advertising revenue:
... Read moreOpenAds, one of the world's most exciting open-source companies, just pulled in $15.b million in Series B funding. The valuation represents a major "up-round," say my sources (and I've got really good sources on this one). The round was led by Accel out of its Palo Alto office.
Why is this such cool news? Because OpenAds rocks the online advertising world, shaking up Google's cozy dominance of the industry:
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It's often difficult to find existing or new customers to adopt a new release. Openads, however, is having the opposite problem. With 10,000 publishers jumping onto the latest release of its ad network, the "problem" will be managing its growth:
I am very pleased to announce that, as of yesterday, over 10,000 publishers are using the latest Openads stable release (2.4). In the space of just 3 months we have reached this exciting milestone with publishers upgrading from the older releases and new publishers turning to Openads to manage their online advertising.
Think of Openads as the open-source Doubleclick. Except that it offers real choice for publishers:
... Read moreIt's by no means the most interesting thing that I write about, but Microsoft tops the list of topics read by Open Road readers. In fact, it accounts for four of the top 10 posts on this blog since its inception in July.
The only open-source vendors to crack the top 10 are OpenAds and MySQL. For an open-source blog, that's a wee bit depressing.
Here they are:
... Read moreOpenAds is one of my favorite open-source companies. It's disrupting a market that is, itself, disrupting other markets. A match made in heaven.
But Scott Switzer, founder of the company and erstwhile CEO, is not taking its future for granted, and has left many key decisions to the OpenAds community, as noted in Linux.com. This is what separates a successful open-source project from a project with an open-source license and proprietary mindset.
Switzer says listening to the community is the most important aspect of commercializing an open source project. ... Read more
(Credit:
Matt Asay)
I spent an enjoyable dinner last night with Scott Switzer, CEO of OpenAds. I've written about the company/project before, but I continue to be more and more impressed. As Scott noted in the course of our conversation, in the not-too-distant future open source will be the default way to develop and deliver software. Of course it will. The efficiency gains in its favor are simply too great.
What happens to you when you finally grok this? It changes completely the way you build a business.
Scott spends his time on things that vastly differ from his competition. He described one competitor as "filled with attorneys." Why? Well, to protect the company's intellectual property (IP), of course.
... Read moreIt's very hard to earn billions of revenue and profit each year. Painful, even! Or so the San Jose Mercury News would have us think about Google. It's hard to be successful!
I assume that Google would rather be in this position than in the alternative position: no one cares about your product/service enough to sue you, reverse engineer you or bother in any way with you.
Google, being successful, has the opposite problem:
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Openads is one of the most interesting open-source projects/companies on the planet. Period. It's an open-source ad server. Like DoubleClick without the lock-in or fees. In other words, it's open source--100 percent GPLv2. I guess it should be no surprise that the world's most popular ad server, powering Web 2.0 business models, is open source, just as the LAMP stack is the technological basis for Web 2.0 sites/services.
I've been following Openads since May, when my friend Bryce Roberts indicated that he was considering investing in the company. (And so he/O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures did, along with Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partner and First Capital in a $5 million Series A round of funding, as Tim O'Reilly reports.)
I caught up today with Scott Switzer, Openads' founder and CTO, to learn more about the company and what it does. Unlike most open-source start-ups, Openads isn't focused on enterprise software. It provides an ad server. This sounds great, but what does it mean? And why does open source matter in this market? That's what I asked Scott.
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