OpenAds nabs some funding

I promised Bryce not to blog this until the round closed, and it’s been painful. I think OpenAds is one of the coolest applications of open source in some time. I’m glad to see Danny Rimer and Bryce Roberts, two of my favorite people and VCs, get this investment, as Tim reports.

Why did it take so long for someone to figure out that this could also be a brilliant new take on the online advertising business? Step one: distribute a free, open source ad server; step two: package up the resulting publisher network for advertisers, regardless of which ad network they want to work with; step three: build additional services for those advertisers.

I caught up last week with Scott Switzer, OpenAds co-founder and community activist, to learn a bit more about OpenAds. It took me a few minutes to understand the OpenAds story (and even now, I may have a few details wrong.) As it turns out, OpenAds is a new name for a project that started in 1999 as phpAdsNew. Since then, it has quietly amassed a network of tens of thousands of web publishers collectively delivering 60-100 billion page views a month. (Compare this with industry-leader DoubleClick’s reported 300 billion.)

Unlike say, DoubleClick, which combines an ad server (named Dart) with an ad network (actual connections with paying advertisers), OpenAds simply provides the ad server software, which helps web publishers to “manage, deliver and track both paid-for and in-house ads, review statistics and create Advertiser reports.” This software allows publishers to connect with their choice of participating ad networks, including Google Adsense, Commission Junction, ValueClick, Kontera, and others.

With those kinds of numbers, though, it’s pretty clear that OpenAds has a lot of possible angles to commercialize its business.

Indeed. Open source is breaking out of all those comfortable barriers the proprietary world has put up for it, hoping that it would play nice and not disturb the sleeping giants.

Sorry.