A VC

Last December I wrote a post in which I called for an open online ad marketplace.

I got lots of interesting feedback from that post, but the best thing about writing that post is I got to meet Michael Walrath, founder and CEO of NY-based Right Media.

Last week Right Media introduced RMX Direct which was covered in TechCrunch yesterday.

I've had an invitation from Michael to put RMX Direct on my blog and I plan to do that, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Simply put, you put RMX Direct on your blog instead of an ad call to whomever you are currently using to servie ads (adsense, ypn, burst, blogads, federated media, etc) and they call those services for you and act as a broker to determine what ad network is going to give you the higest CPM for every single page you serve.

They already do this for large publishers, so RMX Direct is their effort to enter the blog market.

I believe that ad networks are going to dominate online advertsing in the long run and posted my thoughts on why I think this a couple months ago. If you take those thoughts to the next level, then a system to optimize ad networks for the publisher is the next logical step.

We will see if RMX Direct gets traction. There are some issues they will have to solve. First, is it simple to deploy? I'll let you know the answer to that shortly. Second, will third party ad networks agree to work with them? There is some discussion about that subject in the comments to the techcrunch post. And third, and most importantly, will RMX Direct filter out spam, viruses, and unattractive ads from my blog. They have something called MediaGuard which purports to do this. If it works well, they have solved a big issue with an open ad marketplace.

I don't yet know if RMX Direct is going to work well for blogs. But I am very interested because I firmly believe that an open marketplace for online ads will develop in the coming years and it will bring increased efficiency, performance, and revenue to the marketplace. And that is a good thing.