OpenAds is one of the most interesting open source projects/companies on the planet, says C/Net.
It’s an open source ad server. Like Doubleclick without the lock-in or fees. In other words, open source. 100% 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, Mangrove, 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….
In other business news, Fortune profiles Washington Post’s epic struggle in the internet age:
Can newspaper publishers turn the Internet from a threat into an opportunity - as Rupert Murdoch wants to do with his $5 billion bid to buy Dow Jones (Charts), owner of The Wall Street Journal?
It’s a long shot, but it’s their only hope. Their plight is something not often seen in business: Newspapers remain important institutions, providing a valuable public service, but their business model is slowly, or maybe not so slowly, going away.
No less a sage than Warren Buffett, a lifelong newspaper aficionado, the owner of the Buffalo News, and a director of the Washington Post Co. (Charts) for most of the past 35 years, told Fortune, “The present model - meaning print - isn’t going to work.”
The Washington Post, a first-class newspaper that dominates its local market, has the best shot of any at reinventing journalism for the Internet. Since the mid-1990s, the Post has plowed many millions of dollars into its interactive unit, taking readers to unexpected places. They can join a lively global debate about religious faith, read hyperlocal coverage of a fast-growing Virginia county or watch daily video programs from the digital magazine Slate.
Graham has made the paper’s digital business his uppermost priority. “If Internet advertising revenues don’t continue to grow fast,” he says, “I think the future of the newspaper business will be very challenging. The Web site simply has to come through.”
The problem facing Graham is easy to understand but hard to solve. The pillars of the Post, revenues from display and classified advertising, are declining faster than its Internet business is growing. For the first five months of 2007, total ad sales, including print and online, are down by 12 percent. Other newspapers, too, are reporting sharper drops in ad revenue lately than anyone in the business had expected.
Advertisers paid about $573 million last year to reach readers of the company’s newspapers, predominantly the 673,900 daily and 937,700 Sunday subscribers to the Post. Advertisers paid only about $103 million to reach the eight million unique visitors to the Post’s Web sites each month…
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Advertisers are moving to Internet for their marketing campaigns and a very good website http://www.clickindia.com offers advertisers to post their ads for free and also giving them enough exposure to the targetted audiences.
Left by kenpothestar on August 8th, 2007