More Momentum at OpenX: A New CEO from Yahoo! and New Digs

There are big moves going on at OpenX. Former Yahoo! ad executive Tim Cadogan has joined the company as CEO, and the firm is moving its headquarters from chilly London to sunny L.A. If you haven't followed the OpenX story, it's an open source hosted ad management solution that competes with offerings such as Google's Ad Manager. It serves about 30,000 mostly small- to medium-sized publishers with billions of ads per day. There are good reasons to look into it as an alternative to Google's offerings, and one of those is that Google's acquisition of DoubleClick makes it both a publisher and an ad server, which may worry some clients from the perspective of conflicts.

For insight on how OpenX is winning some customers based on concerns about Google being both a publisher and an ad server, Stacey Higginbotham over on GigaOm.com recently got some good input from OpenX's previous CEO. She also notes that OpenX recently got $15.5 million in second round funding led by Accel Partners. In addition, Jon Miller, ex CEO and Chairman of AOL, recently joined the board of OpenX, so there is some moving and shaking going on at the company. (It was Miller who recruited Cadogan as CEO of OpenX.)

With OpenX you can deliver ads from multiple advertisers and ad networks, give high priority to higher value ad campaigns, increase overall click-through rates by limiting how often visitors see a campaign, and integrate the service with most popular existing databases.

As I mentioned in a post before on using open source tools to fuel successful web sites, if you have a site getting major traffic, you may want to look elsewhere, but OpenX is free and easy to start participating in if you get small or medium amounts of traffic at your site or blog.

Interest in the online advertising space is a major reason why Microsoft wants to acquire Yahoo!--a hot tech area. No OpenX has a former senior vice president from Yahoo! who focused on growing the company's online advertising strategy. It will be interesting to see how an open source ad server player fares against the titans over time.

Do you think an open source structure makes sense for an online ad server, or are Google and Yahoo! just too dominant?