"Users want to have a clean layout to read a blog or news site," said TidyRead developer Matthew Chen. His Firefox add-on creates a sweet, hyper-relevant overlay as users browse through content, blocking out all the noise and distraction while leaving the cream of the content fully intact.

"For the algorithm," said Chen, "we use the DOM algorithm, example-based learning and extraction, rule-based unrelated content removal, simple-machine learning, and natural-language processing to try to recognize the text content and related images and videos.

"Sometimes, I am amazed that our simple algorithms work well when I test TidyRead on some complicated pages that are very hard for humans to read."

The implications of such services are astoundingly obvious for those who follow Internet business models: Ads don't work. Not only are click-through rates pathetically low AND inaccurate as engagement measurement; users are becoming more and more irritated with online display ads. Study after study shows that the user's eye is trained to tune out what is largely seen as irrelevant advertising while honing in on the actual content of a page. TidyRead merely facilitates this most common of user behaviors.

TidyRead is currently available as a Firefox add-on, working automagically to transform blog or news pages before the ads even load. "If we are not sure a page is an article, we don't automatically overlay the original page. We don't want to mess up a user's normal surfing."

Chen and team are also working on an Internet Explorer plugin, a Safari bookmarklet, and a Chrome add-on (Google's Chrome browser's add-on feature will be debuted in a couple weeks, said Chen).

Indeed, the state of the newspaper industry has become so dire that U.S. Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced a bill on Tuesday that would grant non-profit status (and the tax breaks that come with it) to ailing newspapers to give them a chance to restructure their business.

Image credit: Trulia blog

Shutting Down the Presses

In the last couple of weeks, a growing number of newspapers have moved their businesses completely online. Just last week, the Seattle P-I announced that it was going to become an online-only publication with a reduced staff (and the latest data shows that the traffic on the site has actually gone down since then).

Laying Off Journalists

The New York Times, sold its venerable headquarters in a lease-back deal earlier this month and will now cut about 100 non-union, non-newsroom jobs. Last year, the Times already cut 100 of its 1332 newsroom jobs. This week, the company also announced that it also plans to cut salaries by 5%. The Houston Chronicle just laid off 12% of its staff - and the list of papers that have ceased publication on the Newspaper Death Watch blog continues to grow.

Note: we mistakenly reported that the times had laid off 100 newsroom workers this week, however, the Times only cut non-newsroom staff this week - most of the cuts in the news division happened last year and the Times actually promises that it will not lay off anymore newsroom staff this year (which, given the current situation, might be overly optimistic in our opinion).

The Breaking Point: Are We There Yet?

One thing is clear: a lot of newspaper are about to hit their breaking point. While there was already a trend towards online publications, the current economic climate is only accelerating this process. Gimmicky experiments like a custom newspaper that readers can print at home will do little to reverse this trend. Indeed, while some forms of printed newspapers (think free, fully advertising-financed newspapers distributed at train stations in Europe, for example) will most likely continue to be around for a while, the future of the industry is clearly online.

CC-licensed image used courtesy of Flickr user purdman1.

According to OpenX, as of December 2008 more than 300 billion ad impressions now run through its software every month. Its core product is still the open source OpenX Ad Server - version 2.6 was launched August 2008 and included a new API. This product has had more than 10,000 active downloads and is getting a 25 billion monthly ad impression run rate.

Elephant in The Room

These are impressive statistics, but there is a rather large elephant in the room which today's press release doesn't mention. That of course is Google Ad Manager, which directly competes with OpenX. In a phone call, we asked the CEO of OpenX, Tim Cadogan, if the company had any comparative data showing how OpenX was faring against its much bigger competitor. Cadogan told us that Google and other ad serving companies haven't shared their data. However he did explain how OpenX differentiated itself from Google Ad Manager. There are 3 main differences, he said:

1) OpenX is an independent, neutral provider - a point which Bernard Lunn expanded on here in a March 08 post entitled Manifesto to Avoid a Google Media Monoculture.

Tim Cadogan claimed in the call that OpenX complements what Google does - by which he meant that it can arbitrate between ad networks, including Adsense. Although Tim Cadogan didn't say it directly, the inference is that Google's Ad Manager can't do this arbitration as fairly.

In his March post Bernard made clear what the dangers of using Ad Manager are: "It is the integration [of Ad Manager] with Adsense that is a worry. [...] Take the link to Publisher tools and you get to an Adsense page with all the tools available for Publishers. Yes, all these free tools are designed to sell more AdSense. Letting Ad Manager and other Google tools automatically make these decisions on behalf of AdSense while you fly blind is not smart".

2) The second difference between OpenX and Ad Manager, according to Tim Cadogan, is that OpenX is open source and "infinitiely customizable".

Examples of companies using OpenX Ad Server are FM Publishing (another disclosure: they are our ad network), AOL's Userplane (for Enterprise), Dragon Media Online (Enterprise), and AneXusIT (Video).

3) The third difference is that OpenX is "very very feature rich" compared to other ad servers - and not just Google's, noted Cadogan.

These are all good points, although of course none of it may be relevant if Google gains dominance in the ad server market. However there's no indication that is happening and OpenX may well be carving itself a great niche as the 'Red Hat of ad servers'.

Revenue Streams

The other open question for OpenX is how will it make money? OpenX has recently developed four new revenue streams:

1) Professional services to its publishers (started in October 2008).

2) Three premium support packages, primarily targeted at large and medium publishers.

3) Premium Hosted packages for Enterprise level publishers, including additional ad impressions, support resources, service level agreements and customized solutions.

4) OpenX Market, a pilot program described as "a new monetization platform designed to connect the company's vast publisher community and their rich inventory to a wide array of advertisers".

The fourth point touches on something that we wrote about back in March. Sean Ammirati speculated that OpenX may "ultimately become an ad network" or an ad exchange. The OpenX Market seems very similar to the ad exchange idea.

So we asked Tim Cadogan if an ad network is on the cards too? Cadogan replied that OpenX won't become an ad network, but that the OpenX Market aims to help publishers source better yielding ads - so it's a 'yes' on ad exchange (but he said they're approaching it in a different way with OpenX Market), but 'no' on the ad network.

We're interested to hear from readers about whether they use OpenX or Ad Manager - or a different product - and what your experiences have been.