I came across a blog post by Bob Buskirk where he discusses his experience using Openads to manage his advertising on ThinkComputers.
"[Openads] is a really powerful program that allows you to input ads into the system [...] for each ad spot on my page I can have many ads rotating and enable and disable certain ads. The system also tracks impressions and clicks so if I have private advertising they can see how their ads are performing."
Bob mentions that he’s trying out different ad networks to improve the revenue he makes from online advertising, in particular he’s trialling AuctionAds.
AuctionAds is relatively new, in fact it’s only just 3 months old, but it already seems to be a real hit for some websites. So what is AuctionAds?
When AuctionAds launched in March, ProBlogger published an insightful review.
“AuctionAds display live eBay auctions to visitors to your blog which are based upon your keyword selection. The payment is CPA (ie you get paid if a reader registers on eBay or if they make a purchase). AuctionAds uses eBay’s built in affiliate program - you could actually run these ads yourself as an affiliate - but Auction Ads cuts down the work involved considerably”
More recently, the ProBlogger readers gave their opinion (en masse!). There are some remarkable success stories but it is clear that success depends heavily on the nature of your website and readership. Product focused websites appear to be the big winner, for example this is one of the reader review comments:
“AuctionAds has been working AWESOME for us. We have a great golf oriented website and just no way to monetize it. AuctionAds was a true blessing in disguise! For April we made over 25,000.00″ - Blue
Andy Beard also blogged his thoughts on AuctionAds, his conclusion…
"I strongly encourage you to take a look at AuctionAds for yourself. If you are an international affiliate, it is in my opinion the best option for the Ebay affiliate program, other than features such as PPC and various RSS and API integration. If that can be added to the mix at a later date, AuctionAds as a conduit for Ebay is going to be huge."
There are plenty of other reviews of AuctionAds by 5 Star Affiliates, Modern Street, Techcrunch, John Chow, Google Blogoscoped and more.
With Openads you could very quickly experiment with AuctionAds to find out if it will work for you. Do you think your readers might be interested in eBay auctions related to your website? Why not try it for yourself today?
Releasing Openads 2.3 Beta to the community has been the key focus of the Engineering Team for months now. I’m pleased to say that their persistent hard work has paid off and the Beta release is now just weeks away.
Many thanks to all those who volunteered to be part of the private beta test group. We’ve been working very closely with this group for a number of weeks now. Their feedback has enabled the developers to improve performance, features and identify any remaining bugs.
The reaction from the Beta test group has been extremely positive. The new installation and upgrade wizard has been a hit, as has the new delivery engine. New features such as enhanced targeting stats (MMM 0.3 users will be delighted!!), campaign capping and zone capping have all been well received.
Openads user Sugababes are already running the Beta version in production have remarked “We’ve had no problems upgrading to the latest version and the upgrade took no longer than 10 mins. The new beta is more stable and has an even more enterprise-level look and feel. Favourite new features are targeting statistics and having the ability to cap campaigns”
We’re making final improvements to the release so watch this space – Openads 2.3 Beta will be with you in July!
As Scott previously mentioned one of our development tasks was to tweak every possible part of the Openads delivery engine to increase the performance. This article explains how we made our PHP application 50x faster.
Myself and another Senior Developer, Matteo Beccati, decided to work on this task. When we first started the latest Openads version was slower from his older brother by an order of magnitude. By the end of the exercise, our changes improved the speed of the delivery files by up to 50 times. It was very exciting to hit new performance record each day of the development cycle.
Don’t believe it when Matteo tries to convince you that we’re magicians. The truth is that we just followed a few simple rules described below.
* Rule number one: Forget about so-called “common sense” and trust only a profiler. PHP has quirks and sulks and there are things you need to know in order to pacify this beast. We have tried many different ideas. Some of them seemed to make sense at a first glance but then turned out to be a complete performance disaster. On the other hand some changes which we would never suspect to be important improved performance a lot. Fortunately, the profiler gave us a helping hand here and provided us with hints so that we knew what to focus on to improve the speed.
* Rule number two: Use the minimalist approach. This rule seems to be obvious but surprisingly often programmers do things in a complex way. We threw away a lot of code. For a start we replaced PEAR::Cache_Lite with our custom simple caching system. As a result the speed improved.. ten times.
* Rule number three: Optimize for real life scenarios. We focused on the speed for the most demanding users. For example, we used opcode caching all the time to ensure that we don’t try to improve things which are already improved by an accelerator itself.
Many people like the colorful and good-looking profiler KCacheGrind (used with XDebug). I need to say that although it looks nice, we chose the APD. All the performance tests analyzed with the KCacheGrind were very unreliable as each time we generated the report, it was different.
The statistics were very interesting and we learned some things about PHP from them. It seems that when we started more than 80% of the delivery time was wasted just on including files. In other words, PHP didn’t do anything useful in that time. Reducing the number of included files gave us such a good performance boost that we even decided to write a delivery merger tool to put all the code from included files together into a single file. Using a more technical term: we wrote a custom Java Ant task which automatically executes after every commit as a SVN post-commit hook and generates delivery files.
Another good example of a PHP “quirk” is the way PHP handles constants. It was one of the major factors affecting performance. Just removing all the constants allowed us to improve the performance by almost 2x (we left one constant to be precise). More useful tips and detailed reports can be found on our wiki page.
After all that fun, our Openads 2.3 release, even with all the new features, is now faster than Openads 2.0 (known previously as PhpAdsNew).
I’ve been asking publishers to tell me about their experience using Openads. The response has been fantastic and I wanted to share some of the first ones we received.
One of the great things about Openads is the diversity of the publishers. The first responses I received were from Mauritius, Germany, Turkey, Canada, Spain, America, Ireland, Colombia, Greece and Australia! They had been using Openads between 3 months and 4 years and between them they accounted for over 400 million ad impressions a month!
I put a simple question to them… why does Openads work for you? Responses ranged from the people who want something which Just WorksTM…
(more…)
As the *non* technical founder of Openads I thought I would try to answer one question that’s been on the minds of many people in the Openads community which is, “What is the Goal of Openads?”
Let’s start with some history. Over the past seven years Openads’ software has been written by many developers around the world. But, but for the past three years, much of the development work was done by Scott and a team of ten core developers. Many of these developers contribute to our Company blog and participate on our IRC channel.
While on holiday last summer, Scott spent time writing & distributing a survey to users of Openads software. The responses were overwhelming. More than two thousand publishers spent time answering six pages of questions, and many had suggestions and requests for how the software could get better. Scott learned that there were many thousands of publishers who were using Openads to serve and manage their online advertising inventory. But, he also learned that there were many areas where the software was failing users, not working as intended or frustrating people who spent hours and days downloading, installing and configuring the software for their needs.
Scott realised that if he really wanted to produce software to meet the community’s needs then he and his team could not continue spending all of their time supporting the needs of only one enterprise customer. I met Scott soon after this revelation. We spoke about his goal for Openads — to build great software that millions of publishers could easily use without lots of technical training. To achieve this goal we knew that we would have to find investors who shared Scott’s vision.
We also had to build a business plan, create a product roadmap for Openads the software product, and a vision for Openads the Company. We were lucky to already have thousands of publishers using our product who had views, opinions and desires about where the product needed to go and what it had to do. The voices, needs and challenges of our many publishers built our product roadmap for the next twelve months. But, we also had to find investors who believed in open source software and believed that businesses that provided value for free could still become successful companies.
We got lucky. In the end we found pretty much the most experienced investors in building open source companies, Index Ventures & O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and also the most successful investor in Europe in supporting free online applications, Mangrove Capital Partners (the earliest investors in Skype). And these investors agreed with our goals for Openads.
So, what are our goals?
1. To build great adserving software that any publisher, regardless of size, can use
2. To give publishers the ability to earn more from their online advertising inventory
3. To allow as many participants in the advertising ecosystem to work together on one platform for mutual benefit
If you think Openads should be doing more let us know!
We’ve been getting quite a lot of feedback and comments the last few days, on the back of the announcement that we’ve raised funding.
Here’s the comment that has interested me most, which was posted on TechCrunch:
Well, then that explains why they haven’t released all the features that users have been begging for over the years like self-signup and PayPal integration. I’m guessing we’ll all have to pay for those features instead of getting them in the OS package. If so, I do hope they crash and burn as all of the support users have given them over the years was to make a better product for all, not to feed ideas for their own startup.
I’ve talked about the evolution of Openads before on our forums, but perhaps it’s a good idea to reiterate a few points, just so that people know where we’re coming from.
I’ve been working on the Openads 2.3 code base for a little over 3 years now - but in a rather circuitous way. When I started, the company I was working for was called Awarez, later renamed to m3, and we were writing something called Max Media Manager, or MMM for short.
MMM was forked from phpAdsNew about 12 months before I joined Awarez, for a very specific purpose - to meet the needs of Awarez’s parent company, Unanimis. So, that’s what we had in mind when we added features to MMM - what does Unanimis need? After all, Unanimis were paying the bills, so we worked on what they needed.
As MMM had come from the open source phpAdsNew, we wanted to give something back to the open source community, if we could - so we kept MMM open source, we made occasional releases, and the staff of Awarez/m3 pitched in whenever they could to help out anyone brave enough to use the incredibly complex and undocumented code base that MMM became over the years. We didn’t have to do this - Unanimis didn’t stand to gain anything from this, after all - but we wanted to.
Of course, the people who used phpAdsNew or MMM requested new features - and self sign-up and PayPal integration are certainly high on the list of most requested. But Unanimis had no need for these features, and we just didn’t have the time in between doing what Unanimis needed us to do for them to put those features into MMM - and with Matteo Beccati as the only person who was volunteering their time to manage the phpAdsNew project, unfortunately the features weren’t able to be put into phpAdsNew, either.
In time, we came to realise that was an opportunity to form a company around the open source products of phpAdsNew and MMM. So, we formed Openads Limited, and we managed to convince Matteo to join forces with us, and now, together, we’ve renamed phpAdsNew as Openads 2.0, and MMM as Openads 2.3.
So, I can understand why people might be asking, “where are the features we’ve requested?” I can understand that they think we’ve had a secret evil master plan all this time to deliberately keep features out of the product so that we can now charge for those features. However, that’s not the truth. Openads the company has only been working, full time, on writing software for you, the open source community, for six months now, and that whole time has been spent working on making sure Openads 2.3 gets the clean up it needs to be released as a solid, stable, fast and well documented successor to the long running and outstandingly successful phpAdsNew (now Openads 2.0) software.
However, as hard as we’ve been working for the last six months on this, we’re not satisfied. The progress we’re making is not fast enough. We want Openads to be better, sooner - but there’s only so much a small team can do in a day. We need to grow our development team if we want Openads to improve more quickly, and to add all those new features people request. To do that, we need money to hire developers. That’s why we raised funds - so we can get more developers on board, and make Openads not just good, but great.
So, we hope that over the next six months, you’ll see the difference from the funding. We’ve heard your requests for features in the past - and we’ve received hundreds of emails over the last couple of days. We’re listening, just like we always have - except that now, our focus is on your needs, and so we’re planning how we can best fit those needs into our development roadmap for Openads right now.
Speaking of translations - what tools have people used in other projects to help translators manage the task of keeping their translations up to date with changes in the master language?
Clearly, the current system used in Openads (simple text files) isn’t that great, and I’d like to see us move to something more advanced. What have people used before that has worked well, or worked poorly?
Over the last four years, my team and I have been tirelessly building what we consider the best - and most widely used - adserver on the web. It is a huge responsibility to build the software that powers such a large percentage of all online advertising.
Today we are announcing that we have taken a huge step forward in the lifecycle of Openads. We have agreed to partner with some of the industry’s best investors - Index Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, and a number of incredible angel investors - to help Openads realise its vision: to become the platform that all websites use to make money online.
One of the major reasons that we chose Index as our lead investor is that they have a deep understanding of open source companies (as investors in MySQL, Zend, and Pentaho), as well as community products (both Index and Mangrove were investors in Skype, and Index also invested in Last.fm). That is a huge level of relevant experience that is backing Openads. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have them on board.
What does this mean for Openads? Openads will always remain a free, open source adserver. Openads will continue to focus on building features that the community wants, so that we have the simplest, most powerful, and most widespread adserver on the planet. The investment means that new versions of software will be released faster than ever.
There are so many people who have been involved with Openads over the years. Our team has done amazing work on our new version of software. The Openads community has provided us invaluable insight into what features to build (and what bugs to fix!). We have received lots of patches from developers worldwide. Community moderators tirelessly answer questions on the forums and IRC. We have security experts from every corner of earth ensuring our software is bulletproof. Openads is truly a community effort - built upon the efforts of those before me (Niels, Matteo, and many others) who have spent many hours per day developing, answering questions, educating others, etc.
The PR announcement is here.
Thanks to everyone involved - this next step promises to be an exciting one for Openads.
Simon Willison’s recent post about “Wait For It” made me think about performance in the ad-serving sphere.
If you’re a publisher with a single web server running your web site and an Openads installation, you’re probably not too worried about performance. So long as your website displays quickly, that’s about all that matters. However, if you’re lucky, your website is getting bigger, and you’re starting to worry about performance.
Alternatively, if you’re using Openads to display ads on other people’s web sites, you’re already worried about performance - the publishers that you serve ads to get pretty irate when their web site “hangs” for 10 seconds every time it gets to a location where an ad needs to go.
So, here are my top five tips for making sure that your Openads site performs as well as it can:
Monitoring
You simply have to have good monitoring of your server(s). Occasionally logging in and looking at top is not enough. You need to know what the CPU utilisation is, what the load is, how much RAM is in use, how much disk IO there is, and how often you’re swapping RAM to disk, all the time. If you don’t have this information, you won’t know where your system bottlenecks are, and you won’t know how to beef up your systems to cope with growth. You probably won’t even know that you need to improve your capacity until it’s too late, and everything has come to a grinding halt.
So, start monitoring now! Check out Cricket, Nagios, or OpenNMS.
PHP Cache
Use a PHP Cache. Easy to do, great for you CPU utilisation!
Manage Disk I/O
Openads is different to just about every open source PHP application. Mostly, PHP-based software is about a database driven web site. Openads delivers content to web sites, for sure, but most of the real load comes from logging all those impressions and clicks. This means you have to sort out your disk I/O - you’ve got a lot of data to write.
So, if you’re expanding your Openads capacity, think about getting a separate, stand alone database server. Make sure this server has great write capacity - wherever possible, go for the fastest drives you can afford, and remember that the more drives you have in a RAID 0 or RAD 10 configuration, the better - writes are faster when you can stripe them across more spindles.
Finally, remember that RAID 5 is a really, really bad idea!
Move Creatives Off-Server
You might also be able to improve your performance per cost ratio by serving up your banner creatives (assuming you’re not serving up text ads, or ads where the creatives come from a 3rd party) from a separate server, or even a cluster of servers. Openads supports configuring your system to load your creatives onto an FTP server, where they can then be distributed by a web server (or cluster) configured specifically for high-speed file delivery, or, if you really need the performance, by a Content Delivery Network.
Use Caching
Openads 2.0 has a number of different options for delivery engine caching, each with various pros and cons. However, to make it simple: The easiest and simplest to use is “file” based caching. Unless you have a reason to use anything else, use that!
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