Every Company Needs a Good Map

In light of the previous post, I thought I should clarify who OpenAds is.

Openads calls itself the "web's largest ad-space community." Recently they were able to raise $5 million in funding from First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners, O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, and Index Ventures (who lead the round). Donna Bogatin did a very nice analysis of the issues that OpenAds faces and she raised some interesting questions in her June 13, 2007 post - How Openads Can Stifle Google.

From the OpenAds website, I plucked this marketing gem:

"Openads is the home of some of the most popular online advertising software available anywhere in the world"  

Which software is popular and which is not, is not clarified. What is meant by popular, is also left to your imagination…

In Donna's piece, she quotes one of the investors, Saul Klein, from Index Ventures, calling Openads one of "the best kept secrets on the Web." This is standard hyperbole from investors. They often want to be seen as discovering a diamond in the rough. Yet the OpenAds website says they are "the world's most popular adserver,"  with 25,000 Web site publishers producing 100,000 websites. That number of web publishers is not compared to anything and we are left to trust their assessment. Since there are over 92.4 million blogs (according to Technorati) and probably 10 times that number of websites, it is hard to believe the OpenAds has made much of a dent. (It has been around for 7 years - first as phpmyadsnew then OpenAds

What OpenAds offers is an Open Source developed product that is free for non-commercial and small business operations. For large businesses, they charge installation, management, and consulting fees. It offers some very attractive options that are not available directly from Google.

1)    Choice of ad networks
2)    Direct control of advertising
3)    More options for campaigns
4)    Tracking both Google and Yahoo ads at the same time.
And more.

As with other Open Source products, it remains to be seen if this is the table or the meal that is being set-up here. Mosaic led to Netscape, which set the table for Microsoft, which is now being joined by Firefox and other Open Source browsers. Once the code for P2P networks was out, there were so many options for file-sharing services that most were unprofitable.

This is not to say that Open Source products cannot support a company, look at Red Hat, Novell, and many others that service and support Linux. It is a word of caution however. Creating a product where you have little or no intellectual property protection is a difficult and often unprofitable game. Everyone likes to think that some how the game will be different for them, but all too often, they are wrong.