Openads, a free, open source ad publishing server, has just rebranded itself as OpenX.The announcement was made yesterday on the OpenX Blog, which states:
"In the past few months we have spent lots of time with folk in our publisher community to understand better what you want from us. Simply, you want us to make it easier for you to make money online. We've already started, launching the beta of the hosted version of our software which we're scaling as fast as possible to meet the overwhelming demand we see (publishers from over 60 countries have signed up for the beta program!)."
OpenX offers free display ad serving software, which allows users to choose their own banners, campaigns and terms. Its flexible system, which makes it easier for display advertisers to take control of their advertising, has been widely praised. According to Matt Asay, writing for the CNET Blog:
"With its competitors (like DoubleClick/Google) taking 40-50% of a website's advertising revenues, Openads' model of charging peanuts to advertisers to source publishers is a big boon to content publishers, 30, 000 of which have signed up to use OpenX."
OpenX may be putting display advertising back in the hands of publishers, but a recent study released by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore this week showed that only 6% of internet users account for half of all clicks on display ads.
However, according to many industry analysts, it's not the clicks that matter when it comes to display ads. A post on TechCrunch comments:
"What [advertisers] should really be doing is stop counting clicks and start measuring things that actually matter to their business, like sales or brand awareness. Counting clicks is easy. Measuring meaningful economic returns is not."
Together, the rebranding of Openads as OpenX and the Starcom, Tacoda and comScore report highlight an important evolutionary trend in display advertising in 2008: bulk buying and discounting is essentially becoming less effective. In the coming months, the emphasis is likely to move increasingly towards intelligent buying as part of a strategy that can be coordinated with SEO and affiliates.
