Yesterday the Openads OpenX team announced a new name for their company and the software. OpenX is the name now, and they say it’s not going to change again. If you’ve changed your name once, what’s stopping you from doing it again? Nothing, really. So even though I was initially somewhat surprised, I tried to look at it from some distance and understand this name change.

The software started it’s life about 10 years ago as ‘phpAds’. After a while it was given a new breath of air and obviously it was not so strange to call it ‘phpAdsNew’. It was hard to pronounce, that’s true. So people started calling it PAN. Then, in late 2006 if I recall correctly, the name was changed again when Max Media Manager (a fork or branch of phpAdsNew) was joined with PAN to again get a new lease on life. Openads was born. I think the latest name change to OpenX adds a little bit of mystery and anticipation, but I do agree with some people saying it’s harder to tell from the name what the software is really for.

There is a very practical reason why OpenX is a better name than Openads, by the way. There are ad blockers on the market (built in to browsers or as separate programs) that block just about anything with the word ‘ad’ or ‘ads’ in the URL. And since people often installed Openads in a folder called ‘openads’ on their site, they were more or less jelling out at these ad blockers to come block their ad content. OpenX is probably less vulnerable to that problem, at least in the short term. I’ve been saying to users and clients all along not to name the folder after the product. And this name change serves as a strong reminder of my point.

I want to wish OpenX (the software and the company) the best of luck with the new name, because after all, it’s just a name!