Orange Teams Up With OpenX To Launch Orange Ad Market In Europe

[engine]

Orange Teams Up With OpenX To Launch Orange Ad Market In Europe [digital.venturebeat.com]

Orange, the key brand from Europe’s third-largest telecom, and OpenX, an open-source ad server, are teaming up to challenge Google’s DoubleClick in the European ad exchange market.

“Globally, there may be three key players or so, but in Europe, there is no real leader. The market is wide open,” said Tim Cadogan, OpenX’s chief executive.

The two companies say publishers will be able to sell ad inventory in a real-time auction market. They can set a price floor to prevent their pricing power from eroding away. Advertisers can bid on inventory with one payment even if they’re buying in different markets with different currencies. OpenX takes 20 percent of ad revenue it helps bring publishers.

[weeks]

Good for OpenX! (I am a big fan of OpenX. Their UI rocks. We run our own ads.) This is good news for those who fear that Google is taking over the online advertising world (i.e., anyone with any sense. Heck, I think even Google worries about it a little.)

[mack]

I wonder how this will pan out with the proposed merger between Orange and T-Mobile on Europe?

Mack.

[Alcoholico]

Good for them, I wish them the best but personally I do not think that's going to work. This sort of "european initiatives" reminds me of Quaero, born death. Beating G (for giant) requires a single united and committed entity with ample technological and marketing expertise, and willing to invest money. This is valid in the United States, Europe and the world. Of course nobody needs G to be beaten, what we need is real options and competition, not the de-facto monopoly of G.

[moTi]

if they don't act all too dumb, i think some movement in this direction could actually pan out.
i am one of many publishers who has blocked google image ads because of the ridiculously low ad quality and the ridiculously low earnings. doubleclick is a disaster. i would gladly welcome any other non-crappy ad network as an option.

text ads and display ads are completely different markets. it's contextual information vs visual impact. clicks vs branding. if you offer freeriding opportunities for one player, he will use them to his own advantage, thereby destroying the marketplace. this is what happens with doubleclick.

image ads are branding and clicks. depends on how you design them.

a) you balance only the clicks, the advertiser will optimize his inventory to do branding for free
b) you balance only the impressions, the advertiser will optimize his inventory to take as many clicks for free as possible.

the publisher gets either a) nice ads for nothing with a lousy click rate or b) crappy ads with call-to-action

when the advertiser isn't charged and the publisher isn't credited the clicks and the additional branding part, display ads will not work, period. is it so hard to understand for the geeks at the plex?

as long as the techies at google don't realize that it makes no sense to let image ads compete with text ads in one and the same auction model, there is a fair chance for a competitor with better marketing skills to invade the display ad market with a separated auction model to adequately reflect the greater possibilities of this advertising form.

[coachm]

This is typical of openx, trying to expand via a lot of hype when their core systems do not work consistently, are wracked with bugs, and cannot possibly used by anyone serious about business. Support is abysmal.

If they spent as much time fixing their platforms, including deadly vulnerabilities and things that break, and bothering to communicate with users, they would be great.

A great product brought to its knees by flat out stupidity and greed.

I believe the Vogons will come and get this folks, sadly.

[dusky]

In concept, the idea could take a small market share from G*, but openx is not quite there yet as complete full scale and all round solution no matter how many servers are in the cluster or clever load balancing you do, the software needs a lot of improvements to compete with the likes of G*. As it is, with minor adjustments and tweaks, yes it is a solid open source solution for a small scale enterprises, up to hundreds of thousands of impressions, BUT not millions of them daily without starting to hick-up.

It has improved over the years and version 2.8.5+ upwards seem to be heading on the right track, but as an independently hosted solution, it lakes many needed plug-ins/modules, themes and technologically built-in features which are widely available in popular open source solutions and CMSs such as Drupal, Zikula, wordpress, Joomla etc.

However, let's not knock them, openx is the best open source and free ad server available today, though there are few who wrote their own that may be better or less complicated.

I wrote a Perl based one and never used it years ago, not quite the scale of openx, but at least I thought of hooks and future usability from the start for modules (plug-ins), themes, payment gateways and database backend scalability / compatibility from mysql to oracle and that was 2002. I never got it out on alpha, not even pre-alfpha, I foresaw the demanding efforts needed to maintain such a huge undertaking and shelved it. I could've launched it as open source (probably would in the future), it wasn't perfect, and I wanted a perfect core to build on and extend, perfect and solid hooks to just plug and go, a framework and codebase which was too demanding I guess and saved myself the embarrassment.

Good luck to them, but if they will base their ad solutions on the current version, they are heading for trouble unless a complete re-write has been specifically done for this purpose which is quite possible!

[brianng]

Currently openx has an sql injection vulnerability that anyone could insert an iframe code to your site. It's been weeks and no words from openx so far

[SlimKim]

Hey moTi,

where you say ... "i am one of many publishers who has blocked google image ads because of the ridiculously low ad quality and the ridiculously low earnings. doubleclick is a disaster. i would gladly welcome any other non-crappy ad network as an option."

moTi --- if a new network offered non-crappy ads, what average net cpm rate would be needed (as measured by you) to be considered decent paying

other posters in this thread are welcome to comment on decent cpm rates too