OpenX Blog

Introducing the Openads newsletter

We’re pleased to announce the very first edition of the monthly Openads newsletter. We’ll use this mailing list to keep you informed of new developments, product updates and security issues. We hope you find it useful.

We’ve already contacted forum members and we’d like to encourage everyone else to sign up today.

Survey results and thanks

Firstly, we’d like to thank everyone who participated in the recent Openads Community survey. The response was excellent. Your feedback helps us focus our efforts on the things that you, the Openads Community, want.

Some interesting results from the survey:

• Openads publishers are making real money - a significant portion of our publishers are achieving $5 CPM.
• The majority of Openads users are managing their own website while the remainder are evenly distributed between people who manage other peoples websites and technical consultants.
• The most popular/requested features amongst larger sites is allowing advertisers to purchase directly on sites followed by benchmarking data and new ad network suggestions.

New additions to the Openads website

You’ve probably noticed some new additions to the Openads website. We’ve been working hard to improve things in many different ways recently.

We’ve added a new section to the Openads website called “Increase your revenue with Openads“. It provides an introduction to online advertising, describes popular types of online advertising and offers advice on managing your ad inventory. We’ve included links to ad networks which you might like to sign-up for. We have affiliate deals with these networks and we will be paid for new publishers who we have referred. This money will go towards future Openads development work.

We have also added a consultancy request form to our website. The forums are, and will always be, the preferred method for developer and community support but we recognise that some businesses need paid support. We are interested in fostering a network of Openads consultants to whom we can refer work. Please contact us if you’re interested in providing paid support to Openads users.

You will also see a demo adserver of Openads to experiment with. It’s running Openads 2.3 which is our current development branch. The demo adserver let’s you see the latest features available with Openads 2.3. As an extra bonus we’ve included the live data from the Openads website and forum adserver so you can see how we use Openads to serve ads, track network affiliate clicks and do conversion tracking on downloads.

Finally we’ve added a new quote on the Openads homepage. We love to hear from members of the Openads community - especially when Openads products provide the very solution needed. Witness forum moderator Craig Goley (from atvsource.com) who says:

“It’s a fantastic product. If we hadn’t found this product, we wouldn’t be here today. For cost effectiveness and ease of use it beats stuff at $300k, $500k hands down. …We were dying, we had to find something or we were screwed, we came across this and… it’s a God-send”

We were so flattered we’ve added the quote to our homepage and promised Craig our first Openads tee-shirt! We’d like to hear how Openads has helped you and perhaps even feature your quote in future newsletters.

Developers’ corner…

The Openads development team continues to work on improvements and new features that you’ve asked for. We want to give you an idea of the development work we’re doing at the moment

One key goal for the development team is stabilising Openads 2.3 so we can release a beta version for wider testing. A crucial part of this work will be to improve the installation and upgrade process. We’ve released a document called “Openads deployment requirements” which was prepared by the core development team as part of a technology and architecture review. It proposes the action plan of work which we are now developing and will give Openads 2.3 a rock solid installation and upgrade process.

In response to many community requests we’re making Openads XHTML compliant. You can expect this in the next release of Openads. Thanks to everyone who suggested this feature.

Survey responses, forum discussions and documentation comments have led us to enhance the Openads 2.0 user guide. In addition to tidying-up the content and correcting errors, we’ve updated the Troubleshooting guide and added new sections for Statistics and Reports. Furthermore, in the next release of Openads 2.0 you can expect to see new context sensitive ‘Help’ buttons in the Admin interface.

If you have comments, suggestions for us, please send us an email, or contact us on our website. We’d love to hear from you.

–
Scott Switzer
Community Leader