Strong mobile business and $50 million investment in product and technology highlight opportunity for continued growth
LOS ANGELES — OpenX, the world’s leading independent advertising technology provider, announced financial results from 2017, highlighted by the company’s tenth straight year of growth and fourth straight year of profitability. Significant investments in mobile, video and quality initiatives helped to further accelerate year-over-year revenue growth for the company to 20 percent in the fourth quarter. The company also reported that the Q4 revenue growth has continued into the first 60 days of 2018.
Since its founding ten years ago, OpenX has successfully navigated the evolution of the programmatic ecosystem, growing successively each year into now the world’s largest independent advertising exchange. Several key factors have contributed to this rare industry success story and underpin the company’s optimistic outlook for 2018:
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Investment in being mobile first: OpenX invested heavily in growing its mobile web and mobile app business in the past 24 months. In 2017 mobile inventory surpassed desktop in the OpenX Exchange for the first time. The mobile business at OpenX grew 39 percent year-over-year in 2017, with in-app revenue surging 89 percent, outpacing overall market growth by more than 2X.
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Massive video growth: Video revenue for the company grew 5,000 percent in 2017, as OpenX’s largest partners turned to the company’s high quality exchange to help navigate the ongoing shift to video in digital media. In 2017, a majority of OpenX’s top publisher clients utilized the OpenX exchange to monetize their video inventory and this number has continued to accelerate in the first 60 days of 2018.
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Commitment to quality: OpenX has built a leadership position in programmatic advertising by making a consistent and unrivaled commitment to quality. In 2017, OpenX invested more than $16 million in quality efforts. These efforts include employing the largest dedicated quality team of any independent exchange to develop and implement proprietary anti-fraud efforts; supporting third-party verification of the company’s quality initiatives such as independent auditing of OpenX’s TAG approved status, and refusing to monetize questionable inventory in order to protect brand investment at massive scale. The company announced plans to increase its investment in quality initiatives in 2018 by more than 60 percent, surpassing $25 million in total. OpenX entered 2018 as the most trusted independent advertising exchange by comScore 1000 publishers based on their ads.txt files and was also the first global exchange to fulfill its publisher obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation, further highlighting the commitment to quality and partner services.
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Investments in technology fuel strong tailwinds: OpenX has a long history of bringing innovative products to market that have fueled consistent growth and profitability for the business over the past decade. To continue its growth trajectory in 2018 and beyond, OpenX invested over $50 million in 2017 R&D efforts towards technology and product which significantly accelerated the company’s growth in the second half of 2017 and into the first 60 days of 2018.
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International growth: OpenX experienced strong international growth in 2017, including 33 percent growth in Q4 in the EU, and strengthening market positioning in APAC that led the company to becoming the top independent advertising exchange (second overall to Google) in Japan, the world’s second largest advertising market. The company also made several key senior hires in both EMEA and APAC to drive future growth.
“I could not be more proud of this team’s work delivering our tenth straight year of growth and our fourth straight year of profitability,” said Tim Cadogan, CEO of OpenX. “Over the last several years we’ve seen an overarching trend where brands, publishers and consumers are increasingly prioritizing quality over everything else. When we look back at our success as a company, our longstanding commitment to quality clearly stands as a differentiating factor.”
Cadogan continued, “In 2017, we fully transitioned to being a mobile first company and are quickly capturing a leadership position in video as well. We also invested more than $50 million in product and engineering innovations and have big plans for 2018. In the coming year we will continue to invest in the future to accelerate both our existing business growth and our new market growth in areas such as OTT and Connected TV. In addition, we anticipate continued strong growth internationally as we expand our already strong market position in EMEA and grow further into Southeast Asia. As we enter our second decade, our business has never been stronger and the opportunity before us has never been greater.”
About OpenX
OpenX powers highly relevant advertising at global scale, delivering quality and value to brands, publishers and consumers across every type of connected screen and ad format. The company’s leading technology aggregates, curates and values consumer interest in real time on one of the world’s largest and highest quality ad exchanges to ensure marketers reach exactly the audience they want. OpenX serves more than 30,000 of the world’s most recognized brands, more than 1,200 websites and more than 2,000 premium mobile applications.
http://www.openx.com
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