OpenX Blog

Since we always strive to keep our community up to date on everything that’s going on at OpenX, we wanted to let you know about one particular project on which we’ve been actively working this week.

Two days ago, a series of potential vulnerabilities of the OpenX Ad Server were disclosed. Our engineers, in conjunction with our always-engaged open source community, have been working actively to quickly deal with and resolve the situation. And we’re happy to report that, in less than forty-eight hours since the disclosure, the problem is now fixed and we’ve released new versions of both 2.4 and 2.6 of the ad server, as well as OpenX Hosted. Both versions of the downloaded ad server, 2.4.10 and 2.6.4, are currently available on our download page.

We take security matters very seriously at OpenX and we know you do, too. By maintaining the security of our ad serving products, we’re able to continue to bring our vast community the comprehensive, customizable and free to use ad serving technology which you’ve come to expect. And, as ever, all of our work is part of our unceasing effort to provide you with a powerful way to control the advertising on your websites so that you can maximize your ad revenue.

To download the new versions, please click here. And, of course, if you should ever find any similar issues with any OpenX products, please let us know.

Details regarding the nature of the issues can be found in the release notes as well as in our forums.

At OpenX, we help web publishers take control of their advertising and maximize ad revenue. As part of our commitment, we’re constantly looking for new ad revenue opportunities to help you make more money.

Based on publisher feedback and interest, we’ve developed the OpenX Ad Network Optimization program. The program is simple - OpenX will manage publisher remnant ad inventory and yield-optimize that inventory across our many ad network partners across the globe, ensuring publishers get the most money from each unit of ad inventory. The benefit to publishers is more revenue and less operational time/expense around managing ad network relationships. All publishers have to do is install a simple OpenX ad tag to get started and let OpenX show you the money!

You might ask, how does this program differ from the many other existing ad network optimization services out there? The simple answer is that OpenX is taking a completely new and unique approach to the problem of how to drive maximum value for ad inventory. Perhaps the most unique aspect of the OpenX optimization approach is that we work with multiple ad networks in combination with our own OpenX Market to get the best price for publisher inventory. This approach to inventory yield optimization combines the OpenX Market ad impression auction with the more traditional method of working with ad networks (where publishers “look back” to review their ad performance from each ad network from the previous day and make changes based old performance data). This hybrid model allows multiple classes of ad buyers (ad networks, agencies and direct advertisers) to bid for OpenX publisher inventory in real time, while also allowing some ad networks to access inventory in a more traditional way. In addition, OpenX will pool inventory from our network of more than 150,000 websites, which will help us drive more scale for ad networks, which should in turn drive higher prices for our publishers.

The bottom line is that we believe this approach will revolutionize how publishers monetize their inventory by creating an open marketplace where publishers can join forces to present their pooled ad inventory to a larger collection of ad buyers, and allow those buyers to access/buy that inventory in multiple ways. The highest price always get the ad inventory.

We’re looking for 100 or so publishers to participate in this beta program, which will launch in early February. Whether your traffic comes primarily from the United States or other parts of the globe, we would love to talk to you about this program. Please contact us for complete program details and to apply.

Erik Geurts is one of the most prolific of the OpenX consultants, and has written the first in a series of posts: How to sell advertising in an economic downturn.

I look forward to the other segments!

More than 100 members of the OpenX community have translated OpenX Ad Server into many different languages over the years. For our newest beta version, v2.7, we currently have 41 languages being translated.

We really would like to step up our efforts now, since OpenX v2.7 beta is right around the corner. The 41 languages are on average 40% complete. Let’s see how many languages we can make available in OpenX 2.7!

If you would like to become a translator for OpenX Ad Server, would like to become a hero of your language community within OpenX, and would like to have official recognition on our site and forum, not to mention an official OpenX Translator T-Shirt, please do sign up and start translating!

Good news! Because of such strong demand for OpenX Hosted (now more than 4,000 publishers have signed up) and the great work of our valiant infrastructure team, our hosting cost per ad served is cheaper than we anticipated. And we want to pass these cost savings on to OpenX Hosted users. So, effective immediately, we are now raising the threshold for the free OpenX Hosted Standard ad serving package from 25M ad impressions per month to 100M ad impressions per month.

OpenX will continue to offer support and dedicated hosting packages in addition to basic hosted ad serving and the Enterprise package, which will remain unchanged. For more information about our hosting plans or premium services, click here. To sign up for OpenX Hosted, click here.