Tags: As many of you know, I spent some time in August asking the Openads community questions about how they use phpAdsNew and Max Media Manager. I spent quite a bit of time trying to wordsmith each question so that we could get as much information about how we could help the Openads community grow, without making the survey a grueling process for anyone to fill out. Once I gathered the questions that i wanted to ask, I ran them by my sister, who knows nothing about online advertising, and rewrote them until they made sense to her.
The process proved successful. We had over 20% response rate, and I received hundreds of emails from Openads users, with comments, praise, and suggestions. Overall, I was overwhelmed at both the amount of responses, and the enthusiasm of the community.
The number 1 request from the community is to have better reporting. Over the next couple of months, you will see the fruits of your survey feedback in Max Media Manager - from graphical reports, to multi-sheet Excel reports, to detailed conversion analysis reports.
Interestingly, the most unpopular request was for database support other than MySQL. I guess that because I surveyed people who have already installed PAN or MMM, they have little necessity to switch databases. I wonder if Openads had additional database support, additional people would join the community. Perhaps if Oracle or Microsoft gave me some software, we would consider adding support!
The Openads community itself is quite disperse - from 140 countries around the world. Europe is the most popular continent, with around 40% of all community members, followed by North America and Asia. On average, your websites generate between 100K and 500K page views per month. The majority of Openads members use our ad server to deliver ad network programs, like Google Adsense, Valueclick Media, and Advertising.com, and affiliate programs, like Affili.net, Tradedoubler, and Commission Junction. There are still quite a few people who sell their ad space directly to advertisers. Also, there are a number of ad and affiliate networks that use Openads technology to run their networks.
- Scott Switzer
Community Leader
Hi,
Has there been any progress on the development of support for MS SQL Server and Oracle? Both provide Express version for dev/personal use and also have trial versions of the full products for download.
We are currently evaluating adserving software and one of the guys have come across OpenAds. On paper sounds good but first concern is the platform it is written on. Currently we don’t run PHP or MySQL. In all fairness for this purpose there would be no problems introducing PHP into our hosting infrastructure however MySQL is another story. Unless the database is completely “blackboxed” we would rather have the option to install onto MS SQL Server or ideally Oracle.
Hope our views help.
Cheers
Comment by JA — August 29, 2007 @ 9:56 am
There have been users known to customize Openads to work with Oracle in the past. But currently, one aim of Openads is to increase database portability by using the Pear MDB2 package. The Openads developers have even been providing bug fixes and code additions to the package.
For more information, see:
http://oss.backendmedia.com/index.php?area=MDB2
Currently, only MySQL is fully supported within Openads 2.3, but obviously by porting to this package in 2.3 we now have the ability to expand support
Comment by Arlen Coupland — August 29, 2007 @ 1:39 pm