The Perfect Ad Marketplace?

The Perfect Ad Marketplace?

An online advertising marketplace is a site that enables advertisers to find and purchase ad spots from a variety of publishers. Likewise, that same marketplace allows publishers to display their available ad spots to a variety of advertisers. The main benefit of a marketplace is that it easily connects advertisers with publishers, allowing both to find each other much more easily than they could have on their own.

For an ad marketplace to be most effective, it needs to be large on both sides. If a marketplace has lots of publishers wanting to sell ads, but very few advertisers looking to buy ads, many publishers ad spots will go unsold. On the other hand, if a large group of advertisers only have a few ad spots to choose from because the publisher base is low, the advertisers will drift away to find another marketplace and the whole system breaks down.

I’ve tried many ad networks, and have been satisfied by relativey few of them. In some cases, an ad network requires publishers meet a set of stringent requirements, such as a volume of traffic that most publishers can never meet. In other cases, despite the network’s potential benefits and ease of use, the population of either advertisers or publishers was just too small to make it profitable for everyone.

I’ve been waiting for that perfect marketplace to come along – one that is open to everyone, without traffic restrictions, and has the volume of both publishers and advertisers to make the system vibrant for everyone. It’s possible that one has finally come along.

I’m tentatively excited that OpenX has created a marketplace. I won’t know for sure if it’s *the one* until I’ve tested it for a while, but the mere fact that it has a large base of users already could be the tipping point that is needed.

So what is OpenX? OpenX used to be called OpenAds and it’s been around quite a while. It is an ad management system that allows you to easily manage your ad inventory, delivering the right ads at the right time, and letting you measure the performance of the ads.

OpenX Ad Server lets you organize and manage all of your ad inventory under one easy to use interface no matter how many websites you have. It works with all kinds of ad formats, ranging from simple banners to rich media. And it’s designed to deliver your ads as fast as possible, regardless of the number of ads on each page.

You can either run OpenX Server on your own server as a free installed application, or you can choose a hosted package that lets you serve ads using OpenX’s hardware and back-end infrastructure. The hosted version is free for sites that have up to 100 million ad impressions per month, so that covers most of the readers who are likely to read this post.

The fact that OpenX is widely used makes it a natural fit for having a marketplace tied into the system. Now that OpenX has finally released its OpenX Market, we might finally have the perfect system.

OpenX Market is designed to help publishers maximize revenue and to help advertisers much more easily reach their target audiences across large numbers of publishers. Publishers can easily route any or all of their ad impressions into the OpenX Market through tools now completely integrated into OpenX Ad Server. Publishers define a minimum “floor” price for their ad impressions. OpenX Market then runs a real-time auction for each impression. If the winning bid from the auction is higher than the publisher-set minimum price, the higher paying ad is served and the publisher makes more money. If the winning bid is less, the publisher’s original ad runs. The entire approach is designed to maximize publisher revenue with zero risk. Advertisers benefit by having a simple way to buy across the potentially enormous pool of primary inventory available from OpenX’s publisher base.

“Historically, the online advertising market has been fractured, opaque, hard to participate in and therefore inefficient. In particular, mid-sized and smaller publishers lack the ability to reach a broad set of advertisers. Conversely, advertisers see lots of value in niche sites and audiences, but find it very hard to discover and buy those sites and audiences.” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “The OpenX Market is all about making these connections simple, seamless and scalable. We have listened extensively to our very large global community of publishers and have developed the Market specifically to overcome these inefficiencies by providing all classes of publishers and ad buyers with a unique monetization platform that we believe will create enormous value for both.”

I’ll be testing OpenX Market over the next few months, and I’ll be sure to let everyone know what I think after using it for a while. Hey, folks, it’s free for publishers to participate, so I recommend everyone consider trying it out and then letting us all know what you think. This may prove to be the perfect way to sell ads on our sites. We’ll see.