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Opening up online ads
June 13, 2007
Billions of dollars have been spent of late on acquiring online advertising companies, notably DoubleClick and Aquantive, but a small $5m investment may prove to be equally significant.
London-based Openads announced today it had received that amount in first-round funding for its free, open-source ad server software.
This helps publishers generate revenues from their websites, giving them control of banner ads and campaigns and the ability to track usage statistics.
Openads says it powers more publishers than all competing solutions combined, with more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries using it.
Index Ventures, backers of Skype, MySQL and other European success stories, took part in the Series A round, along with First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
The latter is the Web 2.0 and open-source proponent Tim O’Reilly’s fund. He blogs today on how Openads could be the Red Hat or MySQL of online advertising, selling services to customers on the back of free software.
Jeff Jarvis says this could be the first steps towards an open-source online ad network, while Donna Bogatin says Openads’ strength in emerging markets could thwart Google’s global growth.
For now, Openads represents an easy next step for small publishers wanting to go beyond Google’s AdSense and open up their sites to other forms of advertising. But its open-source nature means the web community could grow its use significantly and adapt it in any number of interesting ways.
