OpenX Blog

Last month we sent out a survey to the OpenX publisher base on direct ad sales.  We wanted to gather as much data as we could on how publishers approach direct ad selling to distill some insights and best practices in this area.  After sifting through nearly 500 responses, we found some pretty interesting results on what works and what doesn’t work.  And we’re happy to share these results with you.

Download our study on Direct Ad Selling Practices.

We’re hopeful the study provides some helpful tips to your business.  And if you have feedback on direct ad selling practicies that have been particularly successful for you, feel free to let us know.

We’re pleased to let you know that the OpenX Video Plugin is now available! It has already been installed on the hosted OpenX ad server, now called OpenX Community Hosted. And if you are using the OpenX 2.8.2 download, now called OpenX Community Download, you can download the OpenX Video Plugin package here to install it on your own ad server. This plugin represents significant progress, both in terms of the types of ad formats you can manage through any OpenX ad server and in terms of the extensibility of OpenX as a foundation for your ad serving.

The OpenX Video Plugin enables you to traffic your own video ads through OpenX together with your flash media player and media provider. It follows the IAB VAST standard and supports inline video ads, i.e., pre/mid/post-roll ads, and overlay ads, i.e., image, swf, text or HTML ads that display on top of the main video stream. It also allows you to track statistics for VAST-specific events related to your video ads (pauses, mutes, quartile views, etc.). And for remnant campaigns, it provides the ability to serve one companion banner per video ad.

Since this is the first version of the OpenX Video Plugin, it is intended to serve your own video ads only and does not include the ability to integrate video ads coming from ad networks. We will be working to evolve the plugin to include more features like this in the next version.

Please be sure to read through the following documentation on getting started with the OpenX Video Plugin.

Relevant Documentation

• Introduction to the OpenX Video Plugin
• Step-by-step guide on serving your first ad with the OpenX Video Plugin
• Guide to statistics for video ads

Please note: Serving video ads also requires you to use a VAST plugin on your video player in order to schedule the ads for your player and translate the responses coming from the OpenX Video Plugin. If you use Flowplayer or JW Player as your video player, you can use the Open Ad Streamer Plugin from the Open Video Ads project for this purpose. If you use a custom flash media player, you can use the Open Video Ads VAST Actionscript 3 Framework to develop your own custom VAST compliant video player plugin.  Visit the Open Video Ads project to learn more about these options.

Check out the OpenX Video Plugin today and get started with serving video ads!

Hi there,

As you might have read, last week we were very pleased to announce an advertising technology partnership together with Microsoft.

Under this partnership OpenX and Microsoft will cross-market and promote products to our respective publisher bases. Specifically, Microsoft will refer publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions to OpenX and OpenX will promote Microsoft’s Content Ads service (which is a contextual advertising product) to OpenX publishers.

When we evaluated this partnership we thought, as we always do, about our core company goals. Those goals are very clear: to provide advertising technology that helps businesses grow online and help connect those businesses to revenue sources that help them make more money.

We feel this partnership really helps us make progress against those two goals.

First, it will help us enable more online businesses to grow by exposing our advertising technology to more potential customers via the referral arrangement with Microsoft.

Second, the Content Ads component of the partnership enables us to make another revenue option easily accessible to OpenX publishers. By integrating Content Ads into the OpenX Market, it will become another buyer competing for your inventory. We will also build a plugin for the ad server that will make it easy to sign up and use Content Ads. Of course this will totally be at your option.

We’re fired up about this partnership and are looking forward to making it very successful.

Please let us know your questions and thoughts.