OpenX Blog

Introducing another Openads competition winner: Alberto from Axura SRL in Italy

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

Alberto: Wow, what a lucky break. Thank you very much!

OA: I understand you have a long history using Openads.

Alberto: Yes, I’ve been using Openads since 1999. At that time the project was called phpAds and it was being developed by Tobias Ratschiller. Later, I had the pleasure to work with him at Maguma, aah the old days! (Hello Tobias if you’re out there)

Anyway, I’m really impressed by the progress the project has made.

OA:How are you using Openads today?

Alberto: I own a web agency in Italy called Axura SRL. We offer advertising solutions to our customers using Openads and AdWords. We manage ad campaigns for many corporate clients and help them to increase their revenue.

OA: Can you tell us about a website you’ve used Openads on recently

Alberto: I’m working on project which uses Openads at the moment actually. It is a webzine for teenagers but, unfortunately, I can’t tell you its name yet.

The site has dozens of of authors and lots of different sections. Openads is flexible enough to allow us to offer unparalleled functionality and also empowers our customer with a management tool which really has no peers, even among commercial products.

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

I’ve been asked on a few times about the best ways to serve advertising on AJAX websites. On AJAX websites, moving around the website using the page navigation may not cause the page to reload. This can be used to create a more responsive user experience, however it adds some challenges when you want to include banner advertising.

The issue here is that since the web page isn’t always reloaded - the ads on the page won’t be refreshed either. This could mean that someone could spend an hour on your site and only ever see one ad!!! (This is the kind of thing which gives online advertisers and web publishers nightmares)

At first glance the solution seems obvious: serve the ads via AJAX as well. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as it sounds, there are some major limitations and a few technical challenges to overcome. The major limitation is that the webserver and the adserver must be on the same server and accessed by the same domain name – if you are serving a large number of clients this is simply not practical. The technical challenges include issues getting JavaScript to execute remote scripts and compatibility with the workarounds used to avoid double counting of ad impressions.

I was thinking about this and I think I’ve come up with a practical solution assuming you’re willing to accept some limitations imposed by <iframe> tags.

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We’ve been listening to your feedback and over the next few months, we’re going to devote a lot of time to making the Openads interface and workflow better.

We’ve been chatting with as many people from the community as we can. Robert Mibus, Technical Office of Ballistic Media was one of the users who got in touch to tell us how they’d customised the Openads UI to suit their needs.

It’s feedback like this that drives Openads forward, so….

• How would you like to see user interface change?
• Do you think the workflow could be improved? Tell us how!
• Have you customised Openads UI? Let us know why and we can look to incorporate changes.

We want to hear from you no matter how small you think the change is. Post a comment or email us (hello at openads dot org)

We’d like to introduce another Openads competition winner John from Operation Photo Rescue

OA: Congratulations John, you’ve won an Openads t-shirt.

John: Thanks! I’ll wear it proudly.

OA: Have you been using Openads for long?

John: Yes, I’ve been using Openads for years now and I’m currently integrating Openads 2.3 beta into a new website called Operation Photo Rescue.

OA: Tell us a little more about Operation Photo Rescue

John: Operation Photo Rescue is a worldwide group of photo restoration volunteers who are restoring pictures damaged by natural disasters FOR FREE. After our volunteers restore the damaged photos, we then have a couple of printing shops that print them and send them back to their owners, again at no cost.

We started OPR right after Hurricane Katrina and we are still restoring images to this day. We are going to be going back down to Biloxi, MS at the end of August to get more pictures to fix. Openads will be a big part of the next phase of our site.

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IntrudersTV has published a video interview with Scott Switzer, Openads Community Leader.

The interview is wide ranging, giving a good high level view of the Openads project including:

• The history of the Openads
• What the Openads product is and who uses it
• How Openads came to scale to enterprise levels (billions of ads a month)
• Who Openads as a company is and our recent venture financing
• Our vision of the online advertising marketing place going forward
• What we’re trying to achieve

It’s not a short interview (8 mins long) so for those who just want the punch line, Scott finishes the interview summarising our goal here at Openads: “Our sole focus is to help publishers get the biggest possible cheque at the end of the month.”

Watch the IntruderTV interview

A while ago we asked our publishers for feedback on how to make Openads easier to use. Many users said that integration with leading content management systems would give them more time to focus on ad revenue management instead of technology integration. Naturally, we then decided that we should focus our integration efforts on the most popular CMS to start. The results, shown below, surprised us.

It appears that even today in the middle of 2007 more than half of all users are still building their own customized content management solutions or using solutions we never heard of before. Also, it appears there still isn’t a clear market leader in the field.

Of course we realise our data sample might be skewed towards developers who love to program in php and publishers who want to manage their own technology. But we are still happy to see that the two most popular systems in our poll of publishers are from our open source friends at Drupal and Joomla! Does anyone use closed source applications anymore?

In the coming months we hope to release plug-ins to a number of different content management systems but who comes next after Joomla and Drupal is still unclear. Any suggestions??

Continuing in our march towards a non-beta release of Openads 2.3, we have worked hard squashing bugs and improving performance of the beta over the last 2 weeks.

Therefore, we present to you the release of Openads 2.3.36 Beta. This version contains the following important updates:

• Improved support for PHP running as CGI/FastCGI
• Installation allowed for PHP 4.3.10, however please see the FAQ entry
• Fixed delivery of HTML banners in Javascript Zone Invocation Tags where the banner contains “” characters
• Improved the user interface for how email zone linking is handled
• W3C validation in Javascript Zone Invocation Tags

For full details on the new version, please see the Openads 2.3.36 beta release notes.

It’s your feedback that drives the direction of the Openads platform. So keep it coming! A big Thank You to all of the community users who have helped us improve 2.3-beta.

Download the new version now »