Tynt says that people copy and paste content and links 50 times as often as they click on sharing buttons to post to networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now the company is opening up a series of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow publishers to track automatically what particular words readers on their site are interested in. That data has incredible potential, but it's not clear it will be used in ways that befit the opportunity it presents.

Why Tynt Makes Me Sad

For many people, Tynt's insertion of links back are so annoying they consider the company a hostile parasite. There are problems beyond that, though.
Services like this, and I say that broadly because I've not seen anything else quite like Tynt, tend to focus on website publishers because they believe that's who will pay for this kind of information. Apparently some publishers don't really know what kinds of content their readers like - but if they found out, they'd publish more like it.

That's understandable from a business perspective, but it's also a little sad. Ought publishers not publish the best content their editorial team is capable of and interested in, according to their editorial brand's unique voice? There's something about publishing on such scale that the interests of your readers isn't obvious, and then making editorial decisions based on sheer numbers, that seems sad to me. Call me a small fry in the publishing business, I guess.

Meanwhile, the data that Tynt offers seems like it ought to be of interest to far more people than just publishers. What about application developers and others who would like to use this data to rank content from other sources? If copy and paste is really 50 times more common than sharing on Twitter and Facebook, then I would think that data would be invaluable for ranking content from third parties.

We've written about sharing services ShareThis and AddThis, both of which already have large sums of money invested in the content sharing data as a platform. Tynt seems likely to have far more data, and data more representative of mainstream email users instead of just social network sharers.

What will become of all this data, though? Will it just be used to steer editorial decisions in a way that panders to what people already know they want? Or editorial that leads, through discovery of things we don't know about yet. Will it be used to target advertisements? That may not be bad - but it's not very exciting either.

What if we get a look into the Web's collective consciousness and all we see is advertising opportunities? Services like Tynt seem like they inhabit a strange place - between an area of great generative potential and a dark and unpleasant place. (Maybe that's just the name, I don't know.)

What would you like to see done with data about what millions of people are copying and pasting? It's time we had that conversation, before this opportunity not just for one company, but for the Web in general, is lost.

Medialets has already partnered with well-known publishers to help launch mobile ad campaigns on Android devices. Earlier this year, New York Magazine launched an Android application with a featured set of Starbucks advertisements built on the Medialets Android SDK. Other publications, like the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR have also taken advantage of Medialets in the past.

Medialets already provides a Universal SDK for iPhone and iPad, giving advertisers a wide network of options for mobile ad initiatives. As the company points out, combining campaigns on both networks using both SDKs is an effective way to reach a wide audience of smartphone users. Medialets also provides analytics that allows publishers to view stats on their efforts across all supported platforms.

Advertising on the Android platform is looking more and more attractive as Apple tightens restrictions for ad networks operating on iPhone and iPad applications. As more publishers look to serve ads to more devices, Medialets is emerging as a popular platform on which to launch their campaigns. With other mobile ad networks creating competition - like Pinch Media and Mobclix - it may be the cross-platform solutions that garner more attention from publishers.

Initially, AMP! will be rolled out on Yahoo!'s newspaper alliance which posts some 600 members including the New York Daily News, the fifth largest paper in the US.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of AMP! is the talk of an open API for networks. "For ad networks, we believe AMP! will accelerate a free market economy for advertising," wrote Yahoo! in a press release. "With core relationship management built into the platform, ad networks can expand their businesses by connecting to advertisers, publishers, agencies, and other ad networks all through an easy interface."

In February, Emre Sokullu proposed on this blog and alternative plan for Microsoft to go after Google that involved splitting up the advertising atom. In essence, Sokullu said that to take on Google, a company that has access to a large amount of ad inventory, has to offer that inventory up to third party networks to sell with their own targeting perameters. "In an open advertising model, the inventory silo, placement silo, and parameter silo are controlled by many different organizations, which can interact with each other and create advertising mashups," he wrote.

Is that what Yahoo! is essentially doing with AMP!, or are the APIs going to enable something more akin to the ad marketplace we see already with Yahoo!-owned Right Media? Yahoo! says that AMP! will allow "ad networks, through an open set of APIs, to innovate on top of the transparent marketplace." It will be interesting to see what exactly that means. A video introducing AMP! from Yahoo! is embedded below.

If you agree that a viable alternative is important to the marketplace, an interesting question is: what will OpenX's business model ultimately be? We'll focus on this question for the rest of this post.

OpenX Business Model

In our ReadWriteTalk interview, Scott mentioned two high-level revenue streams they think about regularly at OpenX:

• Providing Paid Customer Support
• Helping Publisher's Maximize their Ad Revenue

While it seems that customer support is a pretty obvious revenue stream for most open source projects, the 'maximising revenue' idea gives some interesting indications of the future business model for OpenX. Specifically, Scott highlighted three methods:

"I think that the next thing that we think about in terms of the business model is finding the best way for publishers to monetize their site ... we can help them by trying to build efficiency inside the advertising marketplace, which isn’t very efficient today. And that manifests itself in a couple of different ways.

One by getting our publishers better rates for ad networks than they could by themselves.

Another could be for our publishers to be able to take direct ads and build a workflow, so that advertising can be purchased directly from them without having to go through multiple emails and a IO process and payment process and that type of thing.

And another could be for ad networks to be able to take particular parts of inventory packaged up by publishers in a way that’s attractive for advertisers, ad networks. Those are three very specific things that we’re looking at."

Conclusion: Ultimately an Ad Exchange

This line of questioning started with me asking Scott if OpenX ultimately will become an ad exchange. While he wouldn't confirm this, when OpenX talks about "build[ing] efficiency inside the advertising marketplace" it leads me to believe that they will ultimately become an ad network. Scott did point out that they are also trying to be open and integrate with a lot of the traditional networks, such as Right Media - which is certainly a point of differentiation.

While I understand that perspective, according to Scott OpenX is "serv[ing] in the hundreds of billions of ads per month." This is in the same neighborhood as Double Click. And with the recent announcement that OpenX is launching a hosted solution (ultimately giving them even more visibility and becoming closer to publishers) an ad exchange seems inevitable at some point. In the meantime, we'll be testing the hosted ad server on ReadWriteTalk and may eventually use it on ReadWriteWeb as well.

What do you think OpenX will ultimately become? An ad exchange, or do you see another obvious business model? Also, what are your thoughts on Google launching AdManager - is it a threat to publishers?

At a time when other ad networks are being scooped up by the biggest players for staggering sums, the Accel Partners led B round brings this Open Source company's total raised to more than $20 million. The current round also included money from existing investors Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. With this kind of backing you can expect to hear a lot more about OpenAds in the coming months.

In addition to its stand-alone software, OpenAds can also act as a platform for other ad networks to build on top of. FederatedMedia, to which this blog belongs, has reportedly taken this approach.

The new hosted version of OpenAds should dramatically lower the barrier to entry for new publishers. Watch this space.