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)
“We’ve talked about online ad server OpenX quite a bit in the past, and for good reason.”
they are also a good TC sponsor
To be honest, I don’t think any editor here at TC knows who the current advertisers are exactly. It’s the fun part of having people in an organization that deal with stuff like that so it doesn’t get in the way of our reporting.
I do think we use OpenX for some of our ad serving, so added a disclosure in that regard. Will update when I find out if they power the entire inventory or nothing at all.
Apologies I didn’t see the disclaimer at the bottom (or possibly it wasn’t there when I posted that comment)
Actually, it doesn’t matter who sponsors TC. The most important is the news dropped in here is the latest and earliest that you cannot find out anywhere else. If TC covers only the sponsors’ issues instead of the latest, earliest, and hottest, people would go to other blogs that do.
lol do they write more about sponsor? well they do provide breaking news and i love that now whether thatz about someone who sponsored them or whatever
Greg they power some of the advertising backend of Techcrunch. Does it really matter if they advertise or not? They’ve raised funding (from a new partner too) and its newsworthy.
So if they’re sponsoring TC, they shouldn’t be covered?
Raising $10 Millions, and launching their OpenX Market are both news worthy whatsoever.
true just noticed that
I remember these guys when they first started out. Was their first product originally called “phpadsnew”?
Yes, Matt it was known as phpadsnew and OpenAds.
I feel bad for all the TC writers every post must be followed by some justification. I do enjoy the vast majority of the articles and they do in most cases keep me up to date with a lot of current information i am interested in.
Good article it’s not everyday that I really think about the ads plastering the internet.
hopefully they will buy or create an ad platform that they own instead of riding on the coat tails of others websites.
OpenLocator.com – full bore
I think so.
I love working with OpenX. I’m not really interested in OpenX market itself, though. I use openx to deliver banners to various sites, including those of my clients. The reports are simple but effective. Especially the latest version of OpenX is truly an improvement. Much more user friendly then the older system.
I’m creating a series of video tutorials on the system at the moment.
Having a large publisher base, OpenX is in a great position to win the advertising exchange war. It’s rival, Yahoo’s RightMedia, needs to deal with publisher acquisition, while OpenX needs to convert their existing ad serving publishers to use their market feature as well. Much easier.
We just switched to OpenX hosted for our site (www.bigoven.com, a social network about food), and I’m quite pleased with the system thus far.
It does seem rather slow in the admin area, and a few options are buried beneath modal menus in a way that’s a bit cumbersome, but it’s a very powerful system and serving the ads seems very snappy.
For those considering it, moving from pure Google AdSense monetization (say) to OpenX or another ad server is well worth it.
We can now stream-in our in-house ads, we can have multiple ad networks serve our inventory, we can dial up or dial down ads from ad networks, and more.
Good to see a local Pasadena company growing and offering a great product. Congrats to the OpenX team on the funding.
OpenX is a fine “long tail” solution but it lacks many key functions and features that are necessary for larger sites. Their Network is nothing more than a long tail aggrigater with eCPMS in the .25c range. They’ll need to have a few Billion imps a month sold to make any decent cash.
30m is way too much for these guys to ever re-coup. This is a dog.
maybe the lacking features is why they are raising cash, seems like its well managed
when will openx fix their action tracking pixel system?? i hope these 10M will help…
The pixel issue is a big problem with their system as well as their archaic need to deliver an impression to track the click. Its an ad server “light” and any decent sized org with ad ops knowledge will quickly realize that OpenX inhibits growth.
Its a great system for small pubs with limited needs who want FREE but an enterprise solution it is not and it will never be. Especially with the continued price fall of ad servers in general.
What do they need all this money for anyhow?
I’m a big fan of the OpenAds / OpenX platform. I’ve been using it for a few years now, and have an installation serving ~500k impressions a day without breaking a sweat.
I’d love to migrate to their hosted solution, but I can’t get over how ridiculously slow their backend is. Every time I try to migrate, I get frustrated and give up. Hopefully this latest round of funding will go towards fixing that.
can i use openx for my website like – http://www.jeta...wayskonnect.org
To the question from jet Konnect – yes you can. Openx can be integrated to serve ads at most websites as it has a multitude of integration technologies including javascript.
An example small content site is at http://www.combiboiler.org/ where relevant ads are served.
My concern over the hosted platform option is that there are frequent timeouts or slowdowns of the admin back end, including some occasions when you cannot log in. None of this gives confidence that the front end is serving the ads to your site. Hopefully $10 will help then to fix that quickly.