One of my pet projects over the last few weeks has been to build a simple advertising management platform for Wordpress. OpenX has dabbled in this arena before, and has built a plug-in which will easily integrate with OpenX Hosted or Downloaded versions.
However, most users of Wordpress do not need a full featured ad server for their blog. So, we decided to build an entirely separate plug-in which serves ads on its own. We have worked with Mutube, the writer of the very excellent Adsense Manager plug-in, to provide the base to our Wordpress plug-in. The plug-in has the following features:
Automatic detection of over 10 3rd party ad networks and adservers, including Adsense, CJ, OpenX and others
Simple UI which integrates completely in Wordpress
Support for older versions of Wordpress, as well as the newest release, v2.7
Ability to rotate multiple ads in ad zones
Ability to optimise your ad networks by modifying the weight (% of time they show), and ability to allow ad networks to compete with the OpenX Market for the highest eCPM
Easily place ads within blog posts, or in your WP templates
Many more features which make this an incredibly useful tool for your blog!
Advertising Manager for Wordpress is currently being beta tested by a few trusted folks. We are looking for a few others who would be willing to test the plug-in, and give feedback. Hopefully, we can then release Advertising Manager for Wordpress Beta very shortly.
Please PM me or respond in the comments if you are willing to help!
Advertising Manager in Wordpress v2.6
A list screen in Advertising Manager using Wordpress 2.7
An edit screen of Advertising Manager in Wordpress 2.7
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.
We’re very excited to announce that OpenX has been selected as one of the five nominees in The 2008 Crunchies Best International category! The Crunchies is the second annual competition and award ceremony designed to recognize and celebrate the most compelling start-ups, Internet and technology innovations of the year. The competition and January 9th ceremony is co-hosted by TechCrunch, GigaOm, VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider.
Now - shameless bit of blogging ahead - we’d really like to encourage you to vote for us! One ballot per IP address per day will be counted in the final vote. Voting runs through Monday, January 5th (midnight PST).
And, if you’re a true fan of OpenX, please also feel free to place a badge on your website or blog encouraging your visitors and friends to vote, too. Here’s all the code you’ll need to do that:
We’re all working very hard every day to empower you and everyone in the vast and growing OpenX community to take control of your ads and maximize your ad revenue and relevance. And we appreciate the recognition of those efforts that we think this nomination reflects. Thanks for all of your great support!
There’s been a lot happening at OpenX as we get closer to releasing the hosted version of OpenX Ad Server, or as we now call it, OpenX Hosted.
Progress Update
We’ve been working away furiously to build a rock solid hosted ad serving platform, and along the way, inviting more and more publishers to help us with the last stages of beta testing. We’re working through the remainder waiting list now, so don’t be surprised if an invitation arrives in your email inbox soon.
Hosted Feedback
OpenX Hosted is the same ad server you can download for free at openx.org so why would you want us to host it for you?
“With OpenX Hosted I can start serving ads straight away.”
“This saves me time and money. I am not adept at managing the ‘behind the scenes’ tech stuff. Now I don’t need to do any installation and maintenance work. I am SUPER excited!”
“With OpenX Hosted, I don’t have to use my server resources and I always have the latest updates.”
“Now I can provide a professional and respected ad serving platform to my clients.”
Something new: OpenX Market Alpha
OpenX Hosted users will notice a new feature we’ve enabled, called OpenX Market. The OpenX Market, currently in alpha, will let publishers allow advertisers to directly bid on their ad inventory. We’re piloting the OpenX Market with OpenX Hosted beta testers to tune the Market to be as useful (and profitable) as possible for the OpenX community.
The neat part is that OpenX Market will only increase publisher ad revenue because an OpenX Market ad will only be displayed when it makes a publisher more money than they are making with their own ads.
Give it a try. It can only increase your ad revenue and your feedback at this early stage will help us make the OpenX Market a great way to access loads of advertisers!
The OpenX team has released an update to the beta version of our open source ad server.
This release (v2.5.69 beta) resolves a security vulnerability and includes over 70 other bug fixes and enhancements. As always, we’d like to send out our thanks to everyone who has helped us to identify and resolve issues.
A new OpenX beta update is available for download. We were very excited to see how stable the first beta was but, as you would expect, there were lots of bug fixes and enhancements to be made. In fact, in this update we’ve closed 90 bugs!
If you haven’t tried the new OpenX beta yet, now is the time. You can find out about the new features included in the beta programme.
Existing beta testers will be interested in the key bug fixes and enhancements we’ve made:
The OpenX API can now be used to link banners with zones and retrieve ad tags
Distributed Statistics is now able to run more efficiently
Key features including companion positioning, geotargeting and flash banner conversions have been improved.
Even with all the excitement around the hosted version of OpenX, we haven’t lost focus on improving our flagship open source ad server. Today we are launching the public beta programme for a new version of OpenX with the release of the first public beta download.
Write applications which interact with OpenX using the OpenX API
Serve ads faster using the new Single Page Call tag
Deliver more targeting ads easily using the new delivery limitations
Our thanks go out to our private beta testers who have helped shape these new features and hunt down bugs. We’d like to send out a special thanks to MindSpark for contributing the numeric comparison feature (make sure to say thanks if you see him on the IRC channel).
This will become the new stable version of OpenX once we’re confident it has had enough real world testing to ensure there are no critical bugs left undiscovered. We need your help to make this happen. Please take some time to test out the new software and report any bugs you find.
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Note: this new beta version doesn’t affect our commitment to our current stable product. We are currently working on a maintenance release for OpenX v2.4 which should be available in the next few weeks
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