OpenX Blog

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

We have now become the world’s largest adspace community! Our open source ad serving software is used by more website publishers than any other, worldwide. We’re celebrating this with the launch of a brand new website, www.openads.org, and a new commitment to the open source community.

Our open source ad serving software is used by tens of thousands of websites around the world. The Openads community is growing too - downloads have been growing by 50% every year for the last 8 years!

We want to see this community grow and we want to provide the best possible software to help people make money through advertising on their websites.

Bringing our family of open source ad serving solutions under one name is one way we think we can help achieve this goal. We hope the Openads website will eliminate confusion of which version of ad server to use and where to look for information.

The developers behind Openads are the same people who led the phpAdsNew, phpPgAds, and Max Media Manager products. We are committed to putting more development effort towards features that the community has requested.

The name change to Openads also signifies an increased focus on the community for new product features. Over the past four years, the development team have been concentrating on developing Max Media Manager as the ad server for Unanimis Consulting, a large publisher agency in the UK representing people like eBay, the BBC, and other huge websites.

Many of the features of Max Media Manager are the fruits of Unanimis’ customer requests. Unfortunately, these features have often been of little interest to members of the community with smaller websites and without teams of advertising salespeople.

Therefore, the developers of all three open source projects have decided to combine forces as Openads and take the project in a new direction - focusing exclusively on the needs of the Openads community.

This is an exciting time for the people who make Openads happen. This is also a time for users of Openads to become more involved! Please join the development team in welcoming this significant change to the community!