Tags: Today I am very excited and privileged to join the OpenX team and community as CEO. I am excited for all the normal reasons one joins a start-up - a small, fast-growing company driven by a compelling set of customer needs and a passionate, energetic team of people with lots of big questions to answer.
But, I am truly excited for a couple of reasons more specific to OpenX.
First, I believe OpenX has the potential to substantially improve advertising in a truly accessible, open and controllable way for an increasingly wide array of publishers and advertisers.
So what? Well, to me, the most exciting thing about the online economy has been the way it helps more businesses flourish around the world - genuine macro-economic value creation if you will. For example, when I was at GoTo.com in the early days, we were on a clear mission: to help drive the growth of small businesses by enabling them to affordably reach their customers online. We aimed to do this through the simple yet powerful idea of providing pay-for-performance, auction-priced CPC search ads to anyone. At the time (particularly 1999-2001), plenty of people thought we were nuts… but over time the model proved itself and now CPC search ads are the foundation for much of the online economy.
I think OpenX can do a lot to help drive another similar explosion of value creation in the online advertising industry. It has the potential to open up the advertising marketplace through a genuinely transparent, participatory ad infrastructure for publishers, advertisers and ad networks.
Which leads right into my second, very related, source of excitement: the open community participation model OpenX thrives on. I think this community involvement can help us more rapidly understand, develop and deliver compelling products for publishers around the world with customers engaged every step of the way.
So what am I going to be doing? Over the next few weeks I am going to be primarily focused on 3 main areas:
1. Further building out our great team.
<start shameless recruiting plug :-> In particular, if you are a great, highly motivated technologist interested in working at the intersection of advertising technology, open-source and new advertising business models, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us at: hr@openx.org
2. Fully understanding our customers’ needs and how to create the best possible way for our community to participate.
If you use our products, have considered using them, want to contribute ideas or time to the further development of OpenX or just have feedback of any kind, please don’t hesitate to email me at tellme@openx.org
3. Expanding and accelerating our product roadmap to deliver more value to our community of publishers faster.
Yup, alongside some of the big future plans we have, we also know we need to go faster to get the basics right. Therefore we are very focused on the stability and performance of our core products. See also Scott’s recent post on our priorities.
I very much look forward to all your input and dialogue.
Tim Cadogan
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Related links:
Find out more about Tim Cadogan
Press Release: Former Yahoo! advertising executive Tim Cadogan Joins OpenX as CEO
[...] the company who are applying the RedHat model to an opensource ad server have announced some big company changes today. [...]
Pingback by OpenX is Moving to Hollywood « AdViking — April 9, 2008 @ 1:16 pm
Good luck Tim!
Comment by Jeff - buzzmyblog.com — April 9, 2008 @ 3:41 pm
Are you looking for technologists solely in the Los Angeles area?
Comment by Jeff - buzzmyblog.com — April 9, 2008 @ 3:49 pm
Tim - very cool! What a great opportunity to help take the OpenX business to another level. I look forward to watching the progress.
Comment by Willan Johnson — April 9, 2008 @ 4:46 pm
Congrats, Tim. Glad to see there’s life after Y! for you as well.
Comment by Ken Rudman — April 9, 2008 @ 5:39 pm
[...] Interesting news from Kara Swisher at the BoomTown blog, that former Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan is taking the top spot at OpenX — the open-source ad server company that used to be called OpenAds (and before that was phpads). As Kara notes, Cadogan was involved in the launch of Yahoo’s much-ballyhooed Panama ad search product, and before that he was at GoTo.com. His inaugural blog post is here. [...]
Pingback by Can OpenX compete with Google? - mathewingram.com/work — April 9, 2008 @ 5:48 pm
Congrats Tim! Best of luck and it will be fun to see the development and growth of your platform….very cool oppty.
Comment by Scott Curtiss — April 10, 2008 @ 6:18 pm
Now things get interesting.
Clearly there is a shortage of both independent publisher adservers. The idea of an open source adserver getting robust enough and full-featured enough to do great yield management as well as allow for lots of targeting options, in conjunction with an ad exchange is fascinating.
I look forward to watching this evolve.
Hoping there will be a way to Bring My Own Targeting as well as open APIs.
Comment by Kevin Lee — April 10, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
Welcome and good luck.
I see the new slogan on the homepage reads something like “for publishers who are serious about making money”. I am very serious about making money, and I stopped using OpenAds 6 months ago. You want to know why? Three words: No direct billing.
My sole purpose to use OpenAds was to be able to sell ads directly to people who contacted me. Instead of telling them to go thru Adwords (which I use exclusively otherwise), I could get the money and setup the campaign by myself. But with just three advertisers, the process was getting so cumbersome, that I just dropped the whole thing. I know use simple random code and MySQL counters to display ads from advertisers and Adsense. Why should I use OpenAds (or OpenX) if I have to do a million more steps and add the overhead to my web server.
So please, get directly advertiser signup and billing, otherwise, serious money makers will not “seriously” consider OpenX.
Comment by Haydur — April 15, 2008 @ 12:15 am
If you can make it so that an ad zone’s probabilities actually add up to 100% all the time, then we may be able to keep using this product. This thing has become so junky it is barely worth it.
Seriously, I had an ad zone with with 4 campaigns and a total probability of about 10%.
Comment by Marc Steel — April 17, 2008 @ 5:30 pm
Hi Mark,
We could make it that probabilities always add up to 100%, but then we’d have users saying that they don’t want it this way
While generally the probability of a zone will add up to 100%, it definitely will not always be this way - The probabilities are intertwined with all of the campaign settings and banner settings linked to that zone. If all campaigns and banners are limited in some way (capping, delivery limitations, impression/click targets, etc) then a user most likely does not want the probability to add up to 100%
If you do want your zone to always display a banner, but are not able to accomplish this, then we definitely are interested to hear what might be causing the issue. Please provide details on forum.openx.org
A great resource for detailed understanding (and even debugging) of the MPE (Maintenance Priority Engine) is here:
https://developer.openx.org/wiki/display/COMM/Prioritisation+Engine
If you provide details on your campaign per zone setup on the forum, the community (and us) should be able to provide some helpful feedback for acquiring your desired results.
Hope this helps,
Arlen
Comment by Arlen Coupland — April 18, 2008 @ 1:21 pm
Hi again,
I realize that a post on the forum I recently replied to most likely is yours (but a different username) - so hopefully my reply there will help you!
Comment by Arlen Coupland — April 18, 2008 @ 1:23 pm
good luck…
Comment by atul jha — April 28, 2008 @ 6:18 am
Haydour,
Trafficspaces.com is doing precisely what you’ve just asked for.
Andy
Comment by Andy — August 7, 2008 @ 1:35 pm