To be fair, OpenWeb’s premise sounds intriguing enough: help publishers become platforms for healthy conversation and free speech while helping those same businesses acquire first-party data in the process.

But the jury is still out on the way it’s going about it: so far, Open Web is essentially a commenting plug-in that’s using data to fuel an ad network.

Sure, there are nuances to the business now that it has expanded its services into data management, live-blogging and polling. But for all intents and purposes, it’s a business where its potential — and more importantly the narrative around it — is what has stoked investors despite advertising being mired in structural and economic turmoil.

Confused? OpenWeb’s CMO Tiffany Xingyu Wang gets it.

The deal looks contrarian, she admitted — and not just due to the timing.

Over the last year or so, OpenWeb’s raison d’etre has been called into question. The business that says it’s helping to quash online toxicity, was inadvertently fuelling it. It’s all here in an investigation from Gizmodo and the self-proclaimed ad tech watchdog Check My Ads.

Changes duly followed and OpenWeb swiftly got rid of several publishers two weeks after the investigation. Bullet dodged. Let the good times roll.

Not quite. Bad news tends to stick in an ad tech industry known for being “murky at best, fraudulent at worst”. So Xingyu Wang is pragmatic about the future. Yes, a big cash windfall in a volatile economy suggests the company is on to a winner. But the fact that OpenWeb has even had to secure those additional funds so soon after its last cash injection last November says everything about the costs that come with standing up an ad tech business in the current climate.

Take onboarding, for instance. New publishers that want to work with OpenWeb go through a process of artificial intelligence and human-based checks to ensure they’re not affiliated in any way with disinformation or hate speech. It’s not cheap to keep these checks and balances in lock step with the rest of the market.

Then again, the rewards could be worth it all given where the market could be headed.

“The funding round, which was oversubscribed, was a big confidence boost for what we’re building here at OpenWeb,” said Xingyu Wang. “It was another signal that the commoditized part of ad tech, where safety and data privacy can be an afterthought, is going through a paradigm shift.”

It’s a shift to a world of limited third-party addressability, where the market is bifurcated on clear quality lines: on one side there’s premium ad inventory traded on the back of first-party data and consent: the other side is riddled with poorly targeted impressions …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron