OpenX this morning announced it has entered into a multi-year partnership with Microsoft that will allow the companies to “cross-market and promote products” to their respective publishers.
Under the agreement, Pasadena-based OpenX becomes a preferred partner to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and has agreed to promote Microsoft’s Content Ads monetization products and eventual future products to its own roster of web publisher customers.
OpenX said that publishers usings its recently launched OpenX Market and Ad Server products will be able to use MS’s Content Ads, and that the Redmond software giant will refer potential customers to OpenX.
Financial details of the advertising tech partnership, which has been in trial since August 2008, were not disclosed. Microsoft’s director of advertising business development Peter MacDonald did tell Reuters there will be the opportunity for both companies to make money in the deal.
OpenX, interestingly based on open-source ad-serving tech, claims it works with more than 150,000 independent sites that collectively serve more than 300 billion ad impressions a month. The company – formerly known as Openads – is led by former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (Chairman) and ex-Yahoo exec Tim Cadogan (CEO). The company’s backed by over $30 million in funding, most recently having raised $10 million from a host of venture capital firms.
OpenX competes with companies like Google (which owns DoubleClick) and, notably, Microsoft because of its own aQuantive product.
Very smart step!
Bye,
http://twitter....om/alexnautilus
agree…
good move by MS
this is very interesting…
Big move for openx. But the proof will be in the eating. As a happy openx user I’ll be pleased to get a few crumbs off Mr Gate’s full plate.
good move, but the problems with openX marketplace are various:
1. it doesn’t support action tracking via pixel, which is a BIG minus for any direct response advertisers
2. as an advertiser, you can’t run CPC, not to mention CPA campaigns. Advertisers can only bid on CPM.
so overall it’s not good enough for advertisers.
Rightmedia which was surprisingly ignored on this article, is still the leading player in the adserving and ad exchange fields – by far…
I don’t quite get it, why would MS recommend people to OpenX instead of their own Atlas? Or would it just be they’d push people to OpenX if they couldn’t afford Atlas?
atlas is losing major clients, what is up?
OK So MSFT spends 5 billion on AQNT which includes Atlas and Accipitor (two of the larger ad servers) and then they forget about those and partner with a company that powers mostly low quality, long tail publishers?
This is neither strong or smart. Who runs these departments in Redmond? Are they really that far removed from the industry which they control?
This new is non-news for anyone other than OpenX investors who are cheering for this may actually allow them to recoup their funding someday…
agreed, real “premium” inventory. Pork bellies baby.
OpenX stats are inaccessible half the time and that’s one of many issues with it… we switched to google admanager.
Here is a good OpenX vs Google Ad Manager comparison:
http://bit.ly/1KC9ln
The last time I read M$ hates open-source, and now they are teaming up a open-source based company to Fend off Google…. how funny.
Maybe M$ will “embrace, extend and extinguish” OpenX hmmmm
I think googles strenght is in its branding. MS will only be known for desktop software and OS.
Poor, poor play by the idiots in charge at MSFT.
OpenX is not a very good system and their network is filled with the lowest quality inventory. Did OpenX pay MSFT for this ? I hope so.
I just wanted to highlight that we (Live Chat Concepts inc) use OpenX for our network of websites eg http://www.Live...aseballChat.com and love it.
We use the onsite version running on our own servers and I cant reccomend it enough.
Great technology.
Not sure what the Microsoft tie in will do for us but as far as an ad servicing platform – fantastic.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
Founder
Live Chat Concept inc.