Robert Cefail on Open Source Advertising

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Robert Cefail on Open Source Advertising

If you haven't noticed, with Google buying Double Click, AOL buying many different companies, and now with Microsoft with a new announced billion dollar acquisition, the big boys are very serious about having control of the internet advertising market. There is a lot of money at stake for each of these companies, and now there is a new thing for them to fear: Open Source. Open source is nothing new, but the impact of open source technologies impinges itself on every sphere of influence, especially on the internet. And now the big advertising boys are looking a little worried. What is an open source ad server? And why should you care? Basically, if you have a blog, or own a website you can sign up for Google Adsense and make a few pennies. But if you own any kind of a website, its important at some point to get a little better control over your advertising, so that you can monetize it more effectively, or at least test out different ad networks. All those ad networks comprise millions of websites, with billions of impressions per day, most of them with fortune 500 companies using them to advertise. If you have a tool which will allow you to test different ad networks against each other, you can see which network is going to pay you more. There is also a benefit to the consumer as well. All the big ad networks like Doubleclick tie advertisers to a specific ad platform, and as an advertiser you don't just pay for the advertising, you pay a fee to use the platform. An Open Source ad server eliminates that fee. In theory, all advertisers and publishers connecting via an open source ad serving network will give internet advertising a big boost, by taking away some money from the big ad networks, and encouraging even smaller publishers and advertisers to get in the game. Its like eliminating a hidden "advertising tax" on the internet that you have to pay by participating with Google, Double Click, or whoever the big ad network is. There have been several attempts at a good open source ad server, and for small publishers, Php Ads New has been around for a long time, with many people contributing to the project. Just recently http://www.phpadsnew.com/two/ has opened as Open Ads, with over 5 million dollars invested in its further development. It is potentially troubling to see open source projects like PHP ads new and MYSQL morphing into something different than people toiling and generating code for a pet project in relative obscurity, but if you believe in free markets, you also believe that something valuable will be turned by somebody into something that is worthwhile, and in the free market economy, worthwhile means profitable. Open Source projects however, generally have something more in mind than just profit, and the stated intention of many of them, is to provide a free alternative to a patented software that anyone can use. Obviously, this is not greeted warmly by the likes of Microsoft, and even Google tends to step very carefully over this issue, because truly open source is not in the best interest of the profits of any publicly traded company. I for one am thankful to see some alternatives for both web publishers and advertisers and am hopeful that in the future, viable options will emerge that allow web publishers to keep "The terrible trio" at arms length! Robert Cefail

Robert Cefail is a founding partner of In Touch Media Group, which provides Multi Channel Marketing Campaigns, and also of the RCA Group, which specilizes in mergers and acquisitions for publicly traded companies.

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