In the beginning, the 800-pound gorilla of online industry was Prodigy, Inc. This joint venture between IBM and Sears Roebuck boasted 2.5 million subscribers in 1993, the year before Netscape broke open the Internet.

From the very beginning Prodigy was out-marketed by AOL. AOL boasted a number of important unique selling propositions (USPs) like personalized user IDs, chat, and a slicker graphical user interface. But most importantly, AOL put itself forward as the force of online purity, the opponent of crass commercialization, and promised to protect users from the aggravation of advertising.

Prodigy tried innovation after innovation to regain its coolness. It was the first to add a browser that could surf the emerging Web. It directed its users to a weird new search engine called Yahoo!. It introduced online role-playing and parlor games. But it could never shake the taint of commercialism because it sold advertising.

It's ironic how the tables have turned. Prodigy no longer exists. AOL has been investigated for barter advertising deals. Yahoo! is now the poster child of online commercialism. And Google, the "do no harm" company, is worth billions selling its search engine combined with crass annoying Adwords.

The most successful Open Source proponent of the advertising model is VA Software Corporation. VA Software owns the Open Source Trade Group (OSTG), an online mall of new media properties with SourceForge as its anchor tenant.

SourceForge is an amazing phenomenon. It's a collaborative development platform that hosts more than 100,000 Open Source projects for free in return for selling ads. In its latest fiscal quarter, SourceForge boasted that it had one million registered users. That's a lot of people interested in free software. During the same quarter, OSTG reported that it had 19 million unique visitors a month and served 290 million page impressions - that's 3.48 billion page impressions a year. Frankly, I find it surprising that 19 million people are interested in things Open Source. But it indicates that the Open Source movement is much larger than the 400,000 contributing developers often quoted in the popular press.

For the privilege of serving 3.5 billion pages, VA booked new media revenues of only about $8 million in the last 12 months - which translates into a CPM or Cost per Thousand Impressions of $2.36. So the Open Source advertising model is unlikely to create the next Yahoo! or its trailing 12 months revenue of $4 billion but it's a way of making an honest living.

Another major player in Open Source media is O'Reilly Media.

In the past month, Nick Herring, my research assistant, and I contacted some of the major Open Source projects to get a sense of how their Web site traffic compared with VA and O'Reilly. Only the Apache Software Foundation was kind enough to respond and in fact gave us the login for their Web server analyzer.

Apache's Web site serves 26 million page impressions a month to 2.3 million hosts. Based on a CPM of $2.30, and an annual page impression count of 312 million, Apache could be earning $736,320 in advertising revenue a year compared to donations it got in 2003 of $2,875. Think of the good Apache could do with $736,320. They could morph into the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of the Web and give out grants to starving but talented programmers - a rather large demographic of people who don't want to work for "the man".

So my suggestion to Apache and the other Open Source sites is, swallow your pride and stop fretting about purity and start selling ads to the big corporations that are making money off the Open Source movement anyway - companies such as HP, IBM, Oracle, and Dell.

One last comment about VA and the advertising model. As the chart below shows, VA hasn't been able to grow its advertising business even though use of its Web sites, as shown in the above chart, has increased quarter on quarter because the Security and Exchange Commission has outlawed barter deals. This has caused its CPM to decline.

To offset this decline, the company has expanded its merchandise business - selling nerdy stuff through its online shops - and enterprise software. VA CEO Ali Jenab has hired former Oracle and i2 employees to head this sales effort and it's starting to pay off.

This transition to the conversion model is interesting and the subject of my next article on the Business of Open Source.

In the past month, Nick Herring, my research assistant, and I contacted some of the major Open Source projects to get a sense of how their Web site traffic compared with VA, O'Reilly, and SYS-CON. Only the Apache Software Foundation was kind enough to respond and in fact gave us the login for their Web server analyzer.