OpenX Blog

GasMoney Media at www.gasmoney.net, a webmaster and techie focused site, is hoping to hit the sweet spot with its Openads integration.

We got a nice friendly note from Steve telling us about the shift to Openads ad serving technology.

At the moment, Steve’s delivering ad content to his home page and forum pages. He tells us that he’s also set up a page to make it easy to buy adverts on his site.

Steve ’switched up’ to Openads from a banner rotator because of its “versatility” and was “perfect for me”. He had needed more features and Openads delivered.

Specifically, he wanted to set up an account providing advertisers with the ability to control their own banners. He explained a situation whereby 20 advertisers could want to change all at once. A real pain by any account with a traditional solution. With Openads, a snap.

He also found it “very easy to install … very easy to use. A five-year-old can install it as long as they know their way around a computer,” he said. On the functionality side he’s made some suggestions about improving the interface but can’t think of any additional features needed at this point.

Presently, Steve’s preferred ad networks include a hosting company, Google AdSense and CPA affiliates.

Technology-wise, Steve’s using open source software — Openads, of course, and WordPress.

Keep up the good work!

Extreme cycling magazine Singletrack is yet another Openads community member. The magazine’s online presence, www.singletrackworld.com, is a busy site delivering heaps of ads via Openads technology.

The site/magazine advertising manager Matt Letch says their content is for mountain-bikers, “aimed at people who just want to get out ride regardless of age or ability, the bike they own or the area they live.”

Singletrack has been using Openads for seven years, said Matt. “I would recommend it (Openads) to let your customers know how their ads are working … it copes very well with a large quantity of ads.”

“With the new system we were able to provide more control to customers,” he added “with the ability to change their own ads.”

You might know Crunchies as a delicious chocolate coated treat but this Crunchie is quite different.

The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year. The Crunchies is a collaboration project between GigaOm, Read/WriteWeb, VentureBeat and TechCrunch. Best of all, the internet community is invited to choose who wins.

Openads has been nominated for “Best international start-up” alongside some great startups including Atlassian, Gizmoz, MusicShake and Netvibes. We’re thrilled to be in such talented company. Thank you to everyone involved in our nomination.

Who will ultimately win? That’s up to you. Vote for the best international start-up for 2007 today.

Update: This problem has been resolved, the forums are back up and everything should be running fine.

We appear to be experiencing some issues with forum login and registration. Whilst we are investigating the problem, the Openads Community Forum will be read-only.

We apologise for the inconvenience, we hope to have this resolved quickly this evening and we’ll continue to keep you informed.

Best Wishes,
The Openads Team

As 2007 draws to an end, the Openads team are packing their bags and heading off on a short break. Next week we’ll all be off visiting loved ones, relaxing, overindulging and generally recharging our batteries in preparation for what promises to be an action-packed 2008.

Between now and the new year only the most dedicated Openads staff will be checking emails and responding to questions on the forum. Please be patient with any questions you have - we’ll be back up to full speed in the first week of January.

2007 was an amazing year for us here at Openads. Our thanks go out to everyone in the Openads Community who has contributed in any way. We wanted to send out a special thanks to some of our most active Openads Forum contributors including (in no particular order): GoleyC, Erik Geurts, Hieko Webber, PAN_chriss, uwe.ha, Jochen Witte and scriptsservice. Thanks guys, you’ve made a big difference to so many Openads publishers.

Enjoy the holiday everyone. We look forward to working with you in the new year - it should be a very exciting one!

If you looking for tips to help you improve your website’s rank, here’s a good place to start. Search Engine Roundtable hosts tips and tricks from a bunch of industry gurus who can provide you with some insight in ‘what you need to do next’. There’s something for everyone in this site - no matter what your level of expertise.

What’s more, apart from this wealth of good quality content, they manage their advertising using Openads. When you first load the site up, take note of the stylish block banners in the top left. Do a refresh and watch them switch about. Openads and its ability to switch colour variety, style variety and use custom channels is mentioned by one of the site’s contributors here.

Executive editor and Search Engine Roundtable weblog’s site administrator Barry Swartz also has a personal blog where he talks about search and other topics. In this article Barry talks about how he’s using Openads to rotate ads on the Search Engine Roundtable site.
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Thanks for all the excellent information, keep up the good work!

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Article links:
Earning Money From Contextual Ads (Search Engine Roundtable)
Configured Ads To Rotate Positions (Cartoon Barry Blog)
Sponsorship & Advertising Opportunities (Search Engine Roundtable)

Those of you who spend time in the Openads Developer zone may have wondered why things have seemed quiet over the past couple of weeks. It looks like development has slowed, but it hasn’t – in fact we’ve been busy behind the scenes trying out JIRA as an alternative way to manage our development work.

Trac has served Openads well over the past few years, helping us to squash a lot of bugs. But Openads is growing up and it’s becoming more important for us to coordinate more complex projects between independent development teams.We think that JIRA is a better tool for Openads now.

We’re confident that JIRA provides the same functionality you know and love from Trac.It will look different but we expect that the move to JIRA will allow us to maintain the transparency and interaction with the community which we have enjoyed to-date.

What do you think? Have you ever used JIRA before? We’d appreciate your insights. Personally, I’ve been impressed by JIRA – my favourite features so far are sub-tasks, issue linking, and the integration with GreenHopper for project management.

With the evaluation now complete, we’re planning on making the full switch to JIRA in the coming weeks. In the meantime Trac will remain a little out-of-date, so I’d encourage anybody who wants more information on specific issues or bugs to get in touch at the usual address…

InfinityArt adds some serious Latin flavour to our ad publishing community. These guys, from Brazil, are also seriously into Openads.

InfinityArt’s Rick Verreschi shared a quick snapshot of some of his ad serving projects, which range from funky music to traditional business-to-business supplies to community focussed activity centres.

“We have two ad servers running Openads for our clients” Rick said.

Here’s some examples of Rick’s Openads implementations in action:

Keep up the good work, guys!!!

What drove Openads CTO Scott Switzer to choose an Open Source career? Did he just wake up one day and think, ‘wow, I am going to be an open source developer!’?

All is revealed in an interview with podcasting technologist Gene Steinberg, in a lively ‘radio’ interview.

Gene, who is the host of The Tech NightOwl Live podcast, and HostICan’s Denis Motova grill Scott on a more technical level too — all appropriately answered by our CTO extraordinaire.

Hear Scott outline how Openads technology is being adopted by a huge number of publishers and learn about how the system can intelligently delivers ads to target gender and specific geographic location.

Scott describes how Openads can increase earnings yield for publishers who are seeking more from their online ad inventory.

Listen to the broadcast here (mp3 audio file).

I am very pleased to announce that, as of yesterday, over 10,000 publishers are using the latest Openads stable release (2.4). In the space of just 3 month we have reached this exciting milestone with publishers upgrading from the older releases and new publishers turning to Openads to manage their online advertising.

We’ve had some great feedback on the new release of Openads so far:

Andy is right, Openads is very powerful and we need to make it as simple as possible. We are working to improve usability and add other important features which you have been asking for. We’re already busily working on the next big release of Openads.

We’d like to send out our thanks to everyone for your continuing enthusiasm and interest in Openads. We promise to keep focused and bring you the best tools to help you make more money from online advertising.