OpenX Blog

Tim mentioned that we were getting close to 10,000 publishers who have downloaded and installed the newest version of OpenX (v2.6) for their websites. We have been so busy implementing Market and keeping up with OpenX Hosted growth, that we did not notice that we blew through the 10K barrier two weeks ago!

That is a load of publishers in just a few short months. Woohoo!

10k OpenX publishers - we have only begun!

An OpenX community event is taking place in Amsterdam tomorrow. The event is completely free and open to everyone. If you‘re interested in OpenX and our ad serving technology, please come along.

Erik Geurts, one of the most experienced professional consultants in the OpenX community, will lead the event. You’ll also get the chance to meet other OpenX folks - don’t miss out on the opportunity to grill them on all things OpenX.

Register for tomorrow’s event and take a look at the agenda here.

We hope to see you tomorrow!

Last month we announced a competition: share your experiences and advice about using OpenX and we’ll give you an OpenX t-shirt. There have been some fantastic contributions and with the launch of OpenX Hosted we’re starting to see more and more popping up every day.

The winners
Here’s the list of the first 10(+1) winners:

• Kevin Davis: A Free Ad Server We Use
• Milan: OpenX — напредно приказивање реклама на веб страницама (Serbian)
• Victor Caballero:
  Check out the latest OpenX ad serving platform
• Vlad Zablotskyy: Testing OpenX Hosted Beta and OpenX Market Alpha
• James Wallace: Nine Reasons to Have Another Look at the OpenX Website
• Jerry Ong: OpenX Hosted Ads Now Available Free to All Web Publishers
• Gaith Saqer: OpenX Launches a SaaS Version of the Popular Open Source Ad Server
• Kok Choon: OpenX just got better - Introducing The Best FREE Ads Management System!
• GroundFloor SEO: OpenX Hosted Ad Publishing & Ad Management Platform Launched
• David Carrero: Actualización de OpenX 2.6.3 (Spanish)
• Eko Pramuyanto: OpenX Hosted Version (Indonesian)

We want to give away more t-shirts!
We’ll keep handing out t-shirts to the best community contributions. Here are some ideas we think the OpenX community would love to see:

• Five useful things OpenX can do for bloggers
• Video tour of the new OpenX Hosted UI
• How I package my ad space for sale

We’ll keep an eye out for submissions and announce winners at the end of the month. You can keep track of all the latest at OpenX Planet.

Thank you
Thanks to everyone in the community who shared their thoughts and ideas. Keep up the great work!

The OpenX team has released an update to our downloadable ad server.

The release (v2.6.3) includes 80 bug fixes and enhancements. As always, we’d like to thank everyone who has helped us identify and resolve issues.

Find out more in the release notes or download today.

The new OpenX API opens up a world of new possibilities for developers to automate common tasks associated with ad serving. Many publishers want to save time by getting direct advertisers to load up their own campaigns, so we’ve created a worked example showing how to use the API to create an ‘advertise on this site’ form.

By way of introduction, the OpenX ad server API is a web service which allows developers to control the ad server. It gives comprehensive access to the various objects in the ad server like advertisers, campaigns, zones, users… the list goes on. Loading up new campaigns and banners is a good example of how the API can be used.

The worked example builds a script which allows a user to enter details, upload an image file and have this data automatically captured into OpenX. It shows the core processes and functions necessary to allow a user to complete a simple form to load a campaign/banner created in your OpenX installation, ready for linking to your site.

The script could be extended in various ways to better suit your business. One logical next step would be to use the API’s getStats methods at the end of your billing cycle to gather statistics to feed into your invoicing/billing system.

Try the code for yourself, we’d love to see how you extend and improve it.

Using the API: Advertise on my site.