But that has changed somewhat overnight

OpenAds are adding a free hosted version of their sofware, though it is currently in closed beta.

Even with the improvements they made with version 2.4, and certainly those changes were critical for this move to make it more resource efficient, they are going to need some hefty infrastructure in place to serve all the ad units for multiple sites.
So that is one area the new series b funding by new investor Accel Partners will be used.

The big questions are who they are going to decide to go up against, and how are they going to generate revenue?

OpenAds Competitors

Potential Adserver competitors on the upscale side include:-

24/7 Real Media Open AdStream
Advertising.com ACE Serve
Engage AdManager
ValueClick MOJO Publisher
DART (DFP)
Atlas
Google

But at the same time they could also be looking to compete with or effectively wipe out the lower end market

Hitsconnect
Hypertracker
Adminder

AdSense Detective (monthly fee)
AdSense Gold (one time fee)
AdSense Tracker (one time fee)
asRep

It is really a question of who they decide they want to compete against

Google have the potential to offer a definitive solution that could be looked on as conclusive proof for protecting your Adsense account, and combining Analytics and Adsense with Doubleclick would have many advantages, though that level of advertising integration would be scary.

The low end market is pretty much underserved, the majority of bloggers and web publishers do not use any advertising management solution, and a great number probably don’t use tracking either.

A hosted solution is ideal because it lowers the barrier for entry – you could use the code on any platform without server knowledge, even for bloggers using blogspot.

How Would They Earn Money?

• Advertising other affiliate programs
• 2 Tier affiliate programs
• Middleman for CPM based advertising and affiliate JVs
• Become their own affiliate network
• Additional payments for “pro” features

They won’t be able to make any money from Adsense referrals as I believe OpenAds is UK based, though it is always possible to change commercial location.

Scott from OpenAds says in the comments on the blog

Openads will always be GPL, and a download version will always be available. The hosted version is a simpler way for publishers to get up and running without the hassle of installing, configuring, maintaining, etc.

- The hosted version of Openads is free (and of course the downloadable version). In the future, we may offer commercial services to users of either version of openads (downloadable or hosted) if they want additional support.

- We will try to release new features to both the downloadable and hosted versions at the same time.

Like James mentioned above, this is a major step that we are undertaking, and we are very excited about future prospects for Openads. I know that our team has been very focused on this project, and they have been doing a tremendous job so far.

We look forward to offering this huge new offering to more and more people as our beta rollout progresses.

Primary new features include:-

• Enterprise level delivery – Capability to serve billions of ads per month
• Smoother campaign delivery and prioritisation
• Easy integration with leading applications: Track Google and Yahoo! clicks
• Enhanced targeting and campaign management
• Better reporting capability

Full feature comparison list

OpenAds is a complete tracking solution and advertising rotation system, and best of all it is free.

Why Use OpenAds?

It allows you to manage your advertising from one central location, avoid banner blindness and serve different adverts to different visitors.

Whilst lots of WordPress plugins try to optimize for different audiences, such as switching off adverts for social media traffic, Openads can do it with simplicity.
Look at all these filtering options.

* Browser
* Domain
* IP Address
* Language
* Operating System
* Useragent
* US Area Code
* City
* Continent
* Country
* DMA
* Netspeed
* ISP/Organisation
* US/Canada Post Code
* Region
* Referring Page
* Source
* Date
* Day of Week
* Hour of Day
* Longitude/Latitude
* Channel
* Homepage
* Page URL
* Variable

Whilst you might feel it is overkill for a single blog, if you configure a blog to use OpenAds extensively, you have more control, and a lot less plugins and custom code.

As an example why show subscription options on every page to someone who has visited 20 times?

Eventually I will have a full review, but in the meantime give it a try.

That is one of the reasons I have been writing about how to do trackbacks on blogger, because it is much harder to get attention of a busy blogger just by linking.

Openads got my attention by something as simple as adding me to their blogroll, and I noticed the link in Technorati.

What is OpenAds?

OpenAds used to be phpAdsNew and I have been meaning to play around with this for some time.
It is a script you can run to provide full control of your advertising inventory, both for yourself and your advertisers.

OpenAds is an opensource platform, just like WordPress, and is in very active development. Currently they are looking for beta testers for OpenAds 2.3 which adds lots of new features though they have suggested in the announcement post on the OpenAds blog that you should have a fair degree of technical competence.

Currently on most of my niche sites I use PHP Includes for the advertising, and just upload changes to a standard set of files. It is not ideal, but it also does allow me to migrate to other options such as using an advertising management system, such as the type OpenAds provides.

Expect a full review in a few weeks time, but I thought I would drop them a mention here in advance.