OpenX Blog

In preparation for our beta release of 2.3, we are looking for 10 or so publishers that will help us with testing. In return for installing and using Openads on your live web site, we will be available to you for questions that you have, give you support for any problems, and build your feedback into our final product.

If you are interested, please send us an email via our Contact Us page (hello at openads dot org).

Everyone at Openads has been focused on bringing Openads v2.3 to Beta quality. This is a result of months of very hard work, and the team has hit their goal! We are all now heads down into bug-fixing mode, for the next two weeks. We started out with over 120 bugs, and so far, the team has whittled down the bugs to 83 outstanding issues. We will continue to work on this list so that the Openads beta is as solid as possible.

Well done, developers!

There is an article about banner advertising in Ars Technica which describes the value of advertising regardless if there is an immediate response (e.g. a click).

Online advertising can roughly be broken down into performance advertising and brand advertising. Performance advertising is what most websites have exposure to - advertising where the website gets paid if a user clicks on an ad (CPC), purchases something from the advertiser (CPA), or gives something (their data) to the advertiser (CPL). Google Adsense, as well as affiliate programs like Tradedoubler and Commission Junction are forms of performance advertising.

Most sites have exposure to performance advertising - they only get paid on a user action, and the do not get paid because the user noticed their ad, without taking immediate action. This means that advertisers get their brand onto websites for free - and that publishers did not get compensated for the brand advertising.

Most brand advertisers stick to the largest of sites. For example, in the UK, auto companies pay lots of money to be associated with Top Gear, an automotive site which is part of the commercial arm of the BBC. These advertisers pay on a CPM (cost per 1000 banner impressions) basis, so regardless of whether a user clicks on a banner, Top Gear will still get paid. If you look at one of their automobile reviews, you can see that the advertising is entirely brand based. At the time of this blog entry, it looks like Jaguar advertising has taken over the review for a BMW automobile site. This is incredibly valuable inventory for Jaguar - not because of the people who click on their ads, but because of everyone who, subliminally or otherwise, notices Jaguar right next to BMW.

It is great to see that there is more thought going in to the brand side of advertising. I am sure that brand advertisers will make their way from offline media to online in a big way over the next few years. I look forward to it - and hope that this benefits the Openads community as much as I think that it will.

Those of you who have been in the Openads community for a few years or more may remember Niels Leenheer. Niels is a designer and developer, who was the Openads project administrator (back in the phpAdsNew days) from 2001 to 2003. During this time, Niels led phpAdsNew through a fundamental change which formed the basis of what Openads is today. I will spend the rest of this article trying to put in perspective the importance of his contributions.

The Developer
Over the two years that Niels was active, he committed code almost 1500 times. This means that every single day for two straight years, he would commit an average 2-3 times, and that in TOTAL, he was responsible for adding or changing over 200,000 (!!!) lines of code. Ohloh estimates that phpAdsNew has 66,000 lines of code, and they estimate that this effort would take 1 person 16 years to develop.

This was a truly tremendous effort.

If this was Niels’ only contribution, he would be a hero by any standard. In fact, the actual coding of phpAdsNew was only a small part.

The Technical Writer
During these two years, Niels also put out one of the most quality manuals for an open source project that I have ever seen. O’Reilly makes fantastic books for many open source projects, but they pay people to write. These phpAdsNew manuals were written by someone who donated his time to create over 150 pages, freely downloadable. When I was deciding between phpAdsNew and Oasis adservers, the professional looking manual from phpAdsNew was a major factor in my choice.

The Moderator
Niels also provided a huge amount of support for phpAdsNew - over these two years, he answered over 2000 forum messages. Again, that means that Niels answered over three questions per day, every day - the same questions over and over again from newbies (’How do I get maintenance to work?’), installation and configuration queries, advanced bug-fixing information, and blue sky feature ideas.

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Over the last couple of weeks, Radek and Matteo have been tweaking the Openads v2.3 delivery engine to squeeze every bit of horsepower out of a server. When they started, Openads could serve around 100 ads per second on a single server. During their current tests, they are seeing a remarkable improvement - now over 1000 ads per second!

I am sure everyone will welcome these upcoming changes. There are hundreds (thousands?) of people who serve over 100 million ads per month with Openads (plus quite a few that serve over 1 Billion!), and this means a real savings of hardware infrastructure. Optimisation improvements are not only good for the big publishers - people who use shared servers will not be getting as many hate mails from the ISP about their CPU usage.

Radek has posted some Optimisation Practices on the developer site, if you techies are interested in the specifics.

Their work will be released in a few weeks, because it is part of a large development effort to get Openads v2.3 ready for prime time. Well done guys!