Openads secures $5m to compete with Google

Link: Openads secures $5m to compete with Google
Filed under: AdSense News, Open Source News, Google News, Internet News, Venture Capital News

London-based Openads, a provider of opensource advertising software which enables web publishers to generate advertising revenues from their websites, has secured $5 million funding.

The funding will help the compare prepare for increasing global competition with Google’s Adsense service.

The financing round is led by Index Ventures, and also includes US-based First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners which focuses on Europe, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, an arm of the US technology publisher.

Since its inception as an opensource software development project in 1999, 25,000 website publishers across the globe have benefited from Openads’ software.

Although most Openad users are relatively small operations, the software is used on more websites than all competing products combined.

Openads communicates with its users via an open series of discussion boards. As well as being free, the software is intuitive and easy use.

Openads makes its money partly through referral fees from advertising networks, which pay Openads for connecting them to publishers who use openads software.

Its customers include blog ad network Federated Media, Sun Microsystems and online music site Last.fm.