Posts Tagged ‘openx’
OpenX Keeps On Growing, Raises $10 Million More
We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason. The company, formerly known as Openads, is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO) and has in the past shown it’s serious about growing fast and making money in the process.
More recently, we covered the launch of OpenX Market, an alternative online ad exchange platform operated by the Pasadena, CA-based company.
Today, OpenX is announcing that it has raised a Series C venture capital round to the tune of $10 million, which brings the total of funding raised by the company to a healthy $30+ million. Worth noting is that the extra financing is coming from a new lead investor, which is increasingly rare in these troubled times: DAG Ventures led the round, with existing investors Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital and First Round Capital participating. Jonathan Miller, who recently was appointed as the new Chief Digital Officer of News Corp. also chipped in.
OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan in a brief interview didn’t want to go into detail about the valuation of the company after this round, other than that he was pleased with it. He did say that there was still large part of the Series B round ($15.5 million, closed in December 2007) left on the company’s back accounts and that there was no real need for them to raise money, “which of course is always the best time to raise money”.
Cadogan also told me the company is focused on making OpenX Market a success and to continuously add new publishers to its open ad technology platform Ad Server. To date, it has attracted over 38,000 publishers representing 150,000 websites for the latter, and Cadogan also informed me that Market has doubled since it launched a little over a month ago, with a current monthly run rate of over two billion impressions.
More strong figures: OpenX claims that from December 2008 to April 2009, the monthly run rate of impressions for the OpenX Hosted product grew more than 500% to 7.5 billion impressions, with the number of sign-ups for the new product now exceeding 10,000 in six months since its debut on the market.
(Disclosure: we use OpenX to power part of the ad serving here on the TechCrunch website)
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Nokia Ovi Store Launch Is A Complete Disaster
This was supposed to be a glorious day for mobile phone giant Nokia. The Finnish company got out-innovated by Apple a couple of years ago with the introduction and subsequent success of the iPhone and the iTunes App Store, and has been desperately trying to catch up with Cupertino’s disruptive initiatives ever since by launching a couple of new devices on one hand, and consolidating its software & services business on the other hand.
Today sees the worldwide roll-out of Nokia’s Ovi Store, the company’s response to Apple’s App Store (and other centralized content stores for mobile phones and OS’es), and no doubt the company is watching the launch unfold on a global scale with watchful eyes. Here’s the thing: the launch is an utter disaster and I assume (hope) Nokia executives are outraged with the way things are going.
Since I’ve seen the Nokia Ovi Store website come up a few hours ago, I’ve been trying to browse the selection of apps to select 10 that users should download to start off. I found that the store was down most of the time I was trying to snoop around, pages often didn’t load, and if they did they nearly always did extremely slowly. Despite the fact that I constantly needed to refresh and hope for pages to load, I figured that the service must be getting pounded from all the press it’s getting and was willing to forgive the slowness and regular downtime for the time being. But this has been going on for hours on end now, and there’s no sign of improvement.
It gets worse. Out of the ten applications I recommended earlier today, three suddenly disappeared from the Ovi Store for no obvious reason. Searching for them yields no results, but they do pop up in the ‘related items’ section when you’re browsing alternative applications. Nokia offers no explanation why the content suddenly became unavailable, or if and when they will be back. Meanwhile, some apps are showing up twice (e.g. Qik).
The user experience sucks too. Navigating the online store is downright complicated, and the categories being assigned to certain applications and content are way off at times. Entering basic search queries (e.g. ‘games’) often leads to zero results or a freezing page. Publisher profiles sometimes have nothing but a poorly embedded logo, an extremely short description and no link to their own website (e.g. inTouch).
To add insult to injury, we hear people with an Ovi account are unable to use their credentials for logging on to the new service, but that they are being told that there’s already a profile with their username when they attempt to register for a new account. That means Nokia is basically blocking registered users from using its new service at this point.
Update: All About Symbian lists more problems that need solving.
I’ve contacted Nokia’s press services to give them a chance to respond and detail how heavy the load on their servers has been this morning, but the only conclusion I can make at this point is that the Ovi Store launch is a complete fail on Nokia’s part with a service being rushed out the door before it was ready for prime time.
My advice to Nokia: tell us you’re open for business when you actually are.
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OpenX Market Opens For Business As An Alternative Online Advertising Marketplace
OpenX, the largest neutral online ad server for website publishers, is finally ready to take the wraps of OpenX Market, a service that has been in the pipeline for quite some time and was anticipated to make some waves in the digital advertising industry. I have my doubts about its disruptiveness, but website owners and publishers already using OpenX (we use it at TechCrunch) or planning to switch soon are sure going to want to take a closer look at the service, which is being launched in beta today.
In essence, OpenX Market is an independent marketplace where publishers can connect to advertisers directly to sell their ad inventory, while advertisers (either directly or via agencies) can access targeted inventory. Publishers define a minimum “floor” price for their ad impressions. OpenX Market then runs a real-time auction for each impression, with advertisers doing the bidding. If the winning bid from the auction is higher than the publisher-set minimum price, the higher paying ad is served and the publisher makes more money. If the winning bid is less, the publisher’s original ad runs.
It seems like a win-win for the publisher, since you have the ability to shoot for a higher paying ad without risking a total loss of money. If the higher bid doesn’t attract any advertisers, you are still able to fall back to your existing ad. The incentive for advertisers is that they have access to OpenX’s large pool of publisher inventory and ad space. OpenX’s has a publisher base of more than 150,000 websites that flows more than 300 billion impressions through the company’s software. OpenX publishers as well as non-OpenX publishers are invited to participate in the market. Advertisers can also set targeting parameters to find the best space that suits their needs, including user frequency, contextual categories, and technical/browser settings.
The company also rolled out a new version of its OpenX Ad Server 2.8 that integrates with OpenX Market. This lets publishers easily participate in the Market via an OpenX Market plugin, which allows publishers’ ad space inventory to flow directly into OpenX Market for advertisers to bid on.
An eBay-like marketplace for ads is not a revolutionary concept. Right Media and DoubleClick both have exchange marketplaces for advertisers and publishers, but neither are independent platforms like the OpenX Market, where any publisher, even those with other ad servers, can be a part of the bidding process.
OpenX (which used to be called Openads), has been growing rapidly under the leadership of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who is the company’s chairman, and ex-Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan who is CEO. An open-source venture, OpenX has raised around $20.5 million in funding from Accel Partners, Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.
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