OpenX Blog

We’re pleased to announce that OpenX 2.8.1 is now available for download. Along with making a number of UI and backend improvements in this release, we are also introducing some enhancements to the OpenX Market plugin.

• OpenX Market Quickstart - With the OpenX Market Quickstart screen (located on the Inventory tab), you can opt in multiple campaigns to OpenX Market with a single click. So if you’ve already created several campaigns and want to flow some of them into OpenX Market, you can do it all on one page. Furthermore, with Quickstart you can easily set a single floor price for all of your Market-enabled campaigns or different floors for each separate campaign.

• Ad Quality Tool - The Ad Quality Tool gives you more control over OpenX Market ads that get delivered to your websites. For each website, you can go to the OpenX Market Ad Quality Tool screen to see ads that have been served by OpenX Market onto that website. And if you see an ad you’d rather not display, you can block the OpenX Market advertiser campaign that was responsible for delivering that ad.
• Reassociating an OpenX.org account - We’ve now made it possible to reassociate an OpenX.org account to OpenX Market, even if you have to switch instances of OpenX Ad Server for any reason. This means if you have to reinstall OpenX or change servers, you will still be able to associate your original OpenX.org account to OpenX Market without any problems.

Take advantage of these features today by downloading OpenX 2.8.1. And if you are new to using OpenX Market, visit our Get Started with OpenX Market page to get up and running.

Hi there - as I am sure many people already saw, we just raised an additional $10.4m in our third round of funding. For those who are interested, here a few examples of the media coverage: The Times of London, Financial Times, The New York Times, MarketWatch, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MediaPost, and paidContent.org.

We’re obviously delighted to be able to do this in what is clearly a very tough time for many businesses and more specifically, a difficult time for early-stage companies to raise money.

I thought this was a good opportunity to spend a minute explaining what we are trying to achieve at OpenX and then put this financing in that context.

Our mission is simple - to help online businesses grow. We have two strategies to help us achieve that mission:

• Ad Technology. We aim to provide a very comprehensive, extremely flexible ad technology platform that 100,000s of businesses online can use to power their online advertising. Integral to this strategy is the flexibility our open-source approach enables, which allows our users to innovate on top of our platform and thereby truly define and drive their own product roadmaps.
• Ad Monetization. We aim to power an online advertising exchange that helps publishers make more money and ad buyers of all kinds (advertisers, agencies, networks) more easily target and buy media across a very broad swathe of publishers online.

Just in the last six months we have evolved quite a bit. For example, on the ad technology side, we:

• Now provide the OpenX platform in both hosted or download versions.
• Now offer premium services (premium hosted, premium support and professional services) to customers for whom these services make sense.
• Recently launched a major new release (2.8) with a rich set of new features, including a complete plug-in architecture to aid with extensions, eCPM optimization to help publishers make more money and improved stats scalability. And further updates are coming shortly.

And of course, on the ad monetization side, we formally launched OpenX Market in mid-April and we’re off to a really good start, increasing from 1 billion ad impressions to 2 billion in a month.

As a result of all this, we’ve seen terrific growth in both our user base and in our revenue lines, all of which are less than 6 months old.

However, we think we’re just getting started. We still have plenty to improve on and see an amazing opportunity ahead to help many 100,000s more businesses grow their online revenues by using OpenX ad technology and monetization products and services.

The new financing, which buttresses a significant amount of cash we still have from our last round, will help us carefully accelerate certain parts of our strategy when appropriate. It will also secure OpenX as we move steadily towards profitability and will make sure that OpenX is around for a long time as we further build out our products and the community of people and businesses who use them, extend them and contribute to them.

As ever, thanks so much for your support. Please use the products, give us feedback and get involved in the community - whether on the forums or IRC, as a contributor, plug-in developer, beta tester, translator or in simply spreading the word.

All the best
Tim

As John mentioned in his post a couple of weeks ago, one of the major changes in v2.8 is the introduction of a new plugin framework. This framework allows developers to customize many aspects of the ad server functionality.

Wherever possible, we’re trying to build new features as plugins so that you don’t need to upgrade the whole ad server to take advantage of new features like the bundled plugin for OpenX Market, improved GeoIP targeting data from NetAcuity or an upcoming in-stream and overlay video ad plugin we will be including in the next ad server release.

There are currently four main ways that a plugin can interact with the ad server (mapping to the four main areas of the application):

• Web Service API - Plugins are able to define their own method calls to be accessed through the OpenX API
• Maintenance - Plugins can add tasks to the hourly process which summarizes statistics and assigns priorities
• User interface - Plugins can:
  • Add pages to the menu system to add new features and functionality
  • Define new types of banners
  • Generate custom invocation tags
  • Provide additional (Excel) reports
  • Override the user authentication system
• Delivery Engine: There are a number of hooks in the delivery engine at which plugins can register and execute custom code during the ad selection/rendering/logging process.
  • The front-controller allows new delivery scripts to be provided in a plugin
  • Sophisticated targeting rules can be evaluated to control banner delivery
  • Pre/post processing of a banner HTML
  • Events and actions (requests, impressions clicks etc) can trigger plugin events
  • Replace the file-based cache store with something else (e.g. memcache)

We’ve put together some tools to help budding plugin developers get started creating their first plugin including a toolbox with a plugin builder component and a demo plugin showing the kinds of things that can be done with the plugin framework.

And of course you can always jump into the #openx chatroom to ask (or offer) help!