OpenX Blog

We have our second t-shirt competition winner… Tim Turner from New Zealand.

OA: Thanks for downloading Openads and signing up to win an Openads t-shirt! We’re pleased to announce that you’ve won a t-shirt.

Tim: Hey, that’s pretty cool!

OA: What’s your experience using Openads?

Tim: I work as a Development Manager at Enform, a specialist web-technologies provider and developer in New Zealand. Our company has developed web technologies that allow the media industry to integrate all media including the Internet and print media.

We have been using Openads for a couple of years now.

Both www.thecaryard.co.nz, a popular nationwide vehicle search site, and www.gobuild.co.nz, a Builder Directory and Show home information site run Openads. At present we are serving approx 500,000 ad views per month.

OA: Have you tried the Openads 2.3 beta? What did you think?

Tim: Yes, I downloaded 2.3 beta and I’m currently in the process of having a look at it.

My initial response on the new beta is that it looks really good! I didn’t have any problems installing it or getting it going.

One of the features of most interest to us is conversion tracking. We have had advertisers asking for this, so I’m looking forward to getting it up and running.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Tim – the t-shirt’s in the mail.

Jason Barnard
Country:	Mauritius
Website:	UpToTen - a reassuring, friendly world of unique games, songs and activities for children aged up to ten!
Audience:	Used by more than 3,000,000 in over 220 countries. Serving over 70 million page views each month to a niche market - kids aged up to ten.

Jason from UpToTen shares with us his 5 step plan for successful online advertising.

Jason’s website has a global readership. He uses OpenX to manage localized partner advertising and optimize his inventory to beat the basic ad network eCPM’s.

OA: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Could you start by giving us a little background about your website and the online advertising you do.

Jason: Thanks for giving me the opportunity!

I manage UpToTen, a recognized global leader in early-learning multimedia. Since 1999, we have developed over a thousand educational games and activities that are used regularly by more than 3,000,000 users in homes and schools in over 220 countries. We currently serve over 70 million pageviews each month to a niche market - kids aged up to ten.

OA: Given your target audience is an age group rather than a country it’s no surprise to see that your readership is from all over the world. That must make it more complicated to manage your inventory to optimize your returns.

Jason: Yes it does! It wouldn’t be practical for me to sell my inventory directly in each country. In order to get the best results we’ve had to form relationships with specialized agencies in as many countries as possible.

OpenX let’s me manage my inventory. I can geotarget and prioritize delivery for each partner and keep a close eye on how each one is doing. For the rest, I evaluate impressions -> clicks -> revenues for our in-house ads and compare it to Google revenue.

OpenX let’s me do all the juggling and fine tuning. I only spend around 1 hour each week to manage all of this!

(more…)

Our first t-shirt competition winner is Rafael Dohms, a PHP Engineer from Brazil.

OA: Congratulations Rafael, you’ve won an Openads t-shirt!

Rafael: Wow, this is great! I never win anything!

OA: Tell us a little about how you use Openads

Rafael: I’ve been using Openads for over 4 years now both commercially and on my blog

OA: What do you think of the Openads 2.3 beta?

Rafael: I tried out the 2.3 beta this week and now it’s installed on my blog.

Rafael: It’s great! Lots of new features and much easier to install. I’m looking forward to the 2.3 official release. I’m already recommending it to my business contacts.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Rafael and thanks for recommending Openads!

Are you one of the 24 million people on Facebook every month? Well we are! As you would probably expect more than a few of the Openads team have become caught up in the Facebook phenomena that really does appear to be taking over the world.

The logical conclusion was to form an “I love Openads” group on Facebook. Lots of the Openads developers have joined and we’d love to see you there too. Make sure you join our network so we can start sharing the Openads love around!

Join the “I love Openads” group on Facebook today!

Openads supports a large number of different software configurations that range from PHP 4.3 and MySQL 4.0 to the latest PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0. In order to make sure Openads works perfectly on these different platforms we need to test on each one.

Our build server runs CruiseControl and every night it runs our test suite against thirty different PHP/MySQL combinations. This alerts us to any code changes that may have broken compatibility with one or more versions of PHP/MySQL.

But once we find a bug in a particular version how do we fix it? To save each developer having to have five different PHP versions and three different MySQL versions installed on his development machine we use Amazon’s EC2 service to start and stop particular server configurations on demand.

The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is part of Amazon Web Services and is currently in private beta. It provides the ability to start and stop a (theoretically) unlimited number of virtual servers as your demand dictates.

(more…)

Hi everyone.

I’m thrilled to be joining as CEO of Openads at such an exciting time. The 2.3 beta is already attracting rave reviews.

The team has done an awesome job so far this year, and we’ve got some big and ambitious plans for the rest of 2007. Our main goal will be to ensure we continue to delight you - the largest, most passionate and most international publisher communities on the planet - whilst staying true to the core values of Openads.

A quick word about me. I’m a Brit, joining Openads from Skype, another business which used free software and the power of community to deliver real benefits to end users. Before that I was with Yahoo!, one of the biggest names in online publishing and advertising.

I’d love to hear from you what you think of Openads so far, and where you would like us to focus our energy to help you make the most from online advertising.

It’s only July and already the summer has been very exciting for the team here at Openads. In early June we were proud to announce our successful fund-raising of $5M to help us build the Company. Yesterday, on July 4th, we announced the beta version of the newest Openads software which has already been downloaded by an amazing number of users. Today I am happy to announce the latest big news here at Openads which is the hiring of James Bilefield as our CEO.

We were introduced to James as an experienced executive who could help us take the early steps of building a company from our existing open source project. We found James to be a very thoughtful and engaging individual. Over time we also came to recognize that James’ experience at Skype running all of their Europe operations and at Yahoo made him a great fit for Openads. Our goal over the next year, with James’ experience and guidance, is to build an active publisher community that loves Openads.

The PR announcement is here.

Welcome James!

Last week we told you that a new release was coming…true to our word and bang on schedule, yesterday we released Openads 2.3 Beta to the public!

I’d like to thank the people that have worked tirelessly to get us here which include our development team, our private Beta users but also the thousands of users and developers in the Openads community who have contributed bug fixes, code and ideas for how we could all make Openads better.. We couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Both phpAdsNew and Max Media Manager users can take advantage of the new install and upgrade wizard. This important feature manages the entire process for you and takes on average less than 15 minutes to complete.

The new version has a number of exciting new features and enhancements. For full details, check out the product page on the website

We’re committed to making Openads bigger and better than ever BUT we need your feedback! You can let us know your thoughts through the new 2.3 section on the Forum, by posting a comment or just email us (hello at openads dot org).

Download Openads 2.3 Beta today!

Do you use Openads? Do you love what Openads does for you?

Would you like to give Openads some love for the software we write? Help us spread the good word about Openads by downloading an “I Love Openads” love link and pasting a button of your choice on your website or in your email signature.

Hopefully with your help more and more publishers will try Openads and use it to take control of their online advertising inventory!

Content Developer is running a detailed article introducing geo-targeting, discussing the reasons for using it and their experience implementing geo-targeting using the Openads MaxMind plugin.

“I wasn’t familiar with Openads before this project, but am very quickly becoming a fan. The power it gives the publisher who wants to control their ad inventory is pretty impressive for an open source application.”

So what is geo-targetting?

“In a nutshell, geo targeting is the process of capturing a user’s ip address or other identifying information, checking that info against a database that suggests the likely geographic location of that user, and then serving up targeted, customized content based on those results.”

Openads publishers use geo-targeting to more accurately target advertising. This allows them to charge higher CPM rates since they can guarantee that the advertising is hitting a particular demographic based on location.

“Well, one nice thing about OpenAds is that most of the geo targeting groundwork is done for you in the existing code.”

“MaxMind offers lite versions of some of their databases that you can download and install into OpenAds for free. I went this route and installed their GeoLite City, which is similar to their more robust GeoIP® City Database paid version, just not as accurate and with no support.”

There’s a lot of detail in the article which will be of interest to Openads publishers who haven’t look at geo-targeting before and some good links to follow for more information.

Find out more about the Openads MaxMind plugin today.