Openads, the developer of a popular seven year old opensource ad server, have spun out of London based ad network Unanimis and raised $5 million in capital to fund their business. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Index Ventures’ Saul Klein joined the company’s board of directors. Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital also mentioned their investment it on his personal blog.
Openads, formerly called phpadsnew, is the most popular adserver solution when measured by number of publishers using it. They have 25,000 publishers using the sofware on 100,000 sites in 140 different countries and in 20 languages. About thirty ad networks have been built on top of it, including John Battelle’s FM Publishing.
The software is opensource under a GPL license, and so free to use. Openads will make money by layering services on top of the core software, something MySQL, Wordpress, Zimbra and others have done successfully. More information on Openads here.
I remember phpadsnew, although I never really liked it (a friend of mine used it). I’d love to experiment with Openads though.
Best of luck to them. I love it when other companies try and make a go of it with an open source business model. We’re at it too, and I know there are others beyond the examples given above; this is the next logical step beyond the actual development methodology. Best of luck to everyone involved.
And when Google opens up the Doubleclick adserving platforms for free use? What then?
Hadn’t seen phpadsnew/Openads before. It looks a clever platform, with a very clear and powerful admin system.
The Muso: there will always be a place for installed ad serving technology, rather than running through a third-party service provider like Google. I think the two can co-exist well.
phpAdsNew is one of the quiet wonders of the open source world – I’m amazed it doesn’t get more attention. It’s solid as a rock, with loads of polish and great documentation. My involvement with it has been as the ad server used on a decent sized live music community site based in Australia, and it’s served us well there for the past several years.
We’re looking forward to taking advantage of all the work going into the new OpenAds software, and as far as I’m concerned this announcement is just icing on the cake!
Not many people know that small ad servers like these are used by webmasters. Not everyone wants to run google ads. We’ve been publishing our own software for years now too http://www.revsense.com
Its been used by quite a lot of webmasters and provided a decent living to us while doing so
Webmasters always want another option of selling the inventory on their sites and sometimes Google/Yahoo/etc can’t really provide it.
I’ve yet to actually use OpenAds – but it is on the todo list.
- it does look good / someday I hope to get on FM –
– seems it a freakin huge payday
Well, then that explains why they haven’t released all the features that users have been begging for over the years like self-signup and PayPal integration. I’m guessing we’ll all have to pay for those features instead of getting them in the OS package. If so, I do hope they crash and burn as all of the support users have given them over the years was to make a better product for all, not to feed ideas for their own startup.
The phpAdsNew/Openads platform has always been way too bulky and complicated for the majority of publishers.
That’s why we’re building http://adregate.com
Congrats to Scott & his team, well done, well deserved.
We have been using PHPADS / Openads since the beginning and have been able to scale it up to over 1.5B impressions a month.
JJ @ eBuddy
This is fantastic news. If this deal produces a product with the quality of sugarcrm.com everyone will win.
I’ve shared it already with my friends. They are hardly waiting for more:)
This is going on my ToDo list as well. I think Gary brings up a good point though. If they have not been implementing things that the community wants because of future plans to monetize things they need to be upfront about that. I would be more than pissed if I dedicate any time to an OS community and then they pull the rug out and start charging for things.
Am I right to think this would only work with websites written in PHP?
I develop most of my sites using Ruby on Rails. Does anyone know of a Ruby alternative?
Xin, you can run it on some other php server. Ads are put on your ruby site via javascript anyway.
Many big news sites in Estonia have their ads in adsnew/openads. Personally I didn’t like it at all. The user interface is something I call “programmer-made”. Inserting dates by basically writing out sql sentences using drop-down menus is not my idea of a great user-experience
@Gary, read openads answer on http://blog.ope...re-my-features/
Fairly interesting
That should answer your point.
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Always nice to see a project grow up!