Platform allows publishers to choose ad rates

"Advertisers and publishers both need the ability to control pricing—it is high time advertising networks begin to shoulder the risk of making the right match between buyer and seller instead of pushing this risk off onto the web publishing community," says Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb.

Basically, the new platform works by first having the publisher set their ad price. The ads are then shown in that space if, and only if, that price is met by the company's sales force. The company hopes this guerilla tactic will not only help publisher's bottom lines, but also their own. Jay Sears, ContextWeb Senior Vice President of Strategic Products and Business Development said the program is meant to help publishers ". . .demand the best from all of their ad networks, and then come to us and give us a price that's 10% or 20% higher, and tell us to jump over the bar."

While still in testing, the Open PO format was offered to 100 of the comScore's top 250 publisher sites. Now, they are offering the system to all 250 sites as well as other websites that generate 10 million or more impressions per month.

Tags: online advertising revenue