OpenX Blog

Hello,

I spent some time on our IRC chatroom discussing the release of the new downloadable version of OpenX Ad Server (OpenX Download 2.8). It was great to hear from the developers about how the new UI is being received and which additional features they’d like us to consider.

The best way for OpenX to continue building ad products that publishers love is to get continuous, constructive feedback from the community, and to incorporate it into our future product roadmap.

OpenX Download 2.8 has been out in the wild for a few days now and we’re eager to hear what you think: 

1. What new features of v2.8 do you find really useful?
2. How has OpenX Ad Server made an impact on your business?
3. What are the additional features you’d like to see in future versions?
4. What else can we provide to make OpenX more useful to you as you build your online business?
5. Are you using the API or plugin framework to do something interesting?

We will not only use this information for future product roadmaps, but also to build case studies about how folks use OpenX to optimize their ad serving.

Please either leave your feedback in the comments, or contact us. Your feedback is truly appreciated!

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!

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.

We’re delighted today to issue a press release highlighting the dramatic growth and momentum that OpenX has experienced over the past several months.

Some of the key points we shared in the release were:

• A major update to a key metric: 300 billion ads served monthly through our software;
• A new number of websites being powered by OpenX publishers: 150,000;
• Major OpenX Hosted updates: 100% week over week growth in impressions flowing through Hosted; more than 1 billion impressions running through Hosted monthly; and
• Major OpenX Ad Server updates: more than 10,000 publishers actively using version 2.6 and running 25 billion impressions monthly through the downloadable software.

And the media and important folks in the blogosphere seem to be paying attention to this news and, importantly, understand what’s driving it. Here are just a few articles and posts you might want to check out:

• www.techcrunch.com
• news.cnet.com
• www.readwriteweb.com
• uk.techcrunch.com
• ostatic.com

More than anything else, this news is a testament to our vast and vibrant OpenX community and to your active involvement and participation in all that we’re doing.

We’re all working incredibly hard to provide useful and unique open source ad serving products, services and support. And we hope that by doing that, always with a keen focus on our core values of openness and neutrality, we’re truly helping publishers worldwide grow and get the best out of their online advertising efforts.

As ever, we’d love to hear from you, whether you’re completely satisfied (we’re always on the lookout for more testimonials), want to get more involved in the community, have questions, issues or new ideas.

Thanks for all of your help and support.

OpenX is creating some banners for an ad campaign, which advertises OpenX Hosted (guess which ad server we are using for this campaign? ). We created a design contest on 99 Designs to let the community come up with the best design. So far, it is quite a popular contest, with 39 submissions so far.

If you have design skills, please take a shot at making creative for our campaign!

One of the wonderful things about open source software is the fact that the publisher has complete control over the product - if there is a feature missing, it can be built without waiting and hoping your feature request will make it on the product roadmap.

An interesting customisation of OpenX was done by Citex Software, from Cairo, Egypt. They built Adhere, a modified version of OpenX that serves SMS ads, as well as ads for mobile devices. Very cool!

There are a number of companies and individuals who have been asking OpenX to provide mobile functionality. As part of our private OpenX 2.7 beta release (so private, it was only blogged on Twitter ), we are building a group of community members (including some of the folks from Citex Software) to help push forward mobile functionality.

It is early days, but you can check out the mobile project home here. If you want to be involved in the Mobile project, (or any other projects for that matter), please make sure to get an OpenX ID (you can do this by registering for the forums), and post a message in the plug-in forum with the project of interest. (In time this will become more automated).

Well done, Citex Software, and here is a call to start contributing your ideas and developer skills so that OpenX can become as popular on mobile devices as we are on the web!

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!

This is a very exciting time for us at OpenX. Just yesterday we launched OpenX Hosted. This is a huge step forward and should go a long way towards making it easier for our publisher community to benefit from our ad serving technology, and hopefully will encourage a new generation of publishers to use the full power of OpenX to take control of their advertising.

It feels like it’s a good time to reflect on what we are trying to achieve and why.

Our User Focus

Back in the early summer, we conducted a very comprehensive survey of our users. This survey included active users, users who were considering using us and also users who had stopped using OpenX (yep, we do have a few of those). We’ve also increased our dialogue with users since then with more OpenX Days (in Germany, LA & New York), blogs, newsletters and many, many one-on-one conversations with all kinds of users.

Four very clear major needs came out of all these discussions:

1. A hosted version of the OpenX ad server
2. More support options
3. A simpler, more flexible product
4. Help increasing monetization

We’ve taken this feedback to heart and are doing everything we can to act upon it.

Here’s some of the progress we’ve made:

OpenX 2.6 - Approaching 10,000 publishers already

In July we released OpenX 2.6.

2.6 features comprehensive APIs for increased flexibility and interoperability with other systems; a simplified UI (including a new dashboard); a faster, unified ad tag; better delivery algorithms; multi-level account access controls and a host of other features.

We’ve already seen fantastic adoption of OpenX 2.6 In the three short months since the launch 2.6 has grown to nearly 10,000 ad servers! If you are not on 2.6 yet and are interested, it’s very easy to join this quickly growing group by upgrading from an earlier version.

The Professional Services and Support team is growing

Our professional services team is growing and is taking on more publishers who need training, consulting or custom development work. We are also offering premium support packages in clear response to our community’s need. Check out our new services here.

Of course we are continuing to support our free forums with the efforts of terrific team members and ad serving gurus like Arlen Coupland as well as adding Michal Czosnyka to the team so we have more capacity.

OpenX Hosted launched yesterday!

Now we’ve delivered the hosted version of OpenX.

OpenX Hosted lets publishers focus on making great content and selling their ad space and eliminates the need to install and maintain software. You can sign up easily and fast here.

OpenX Hosted includes all of the functionality of the download product and is completely free for all publishers serving up to 25 million ad impressions per month. We’ve created premium packages which bundle extra support and services for larger publishers. More detailed information is here.

Of course, as ever, our downloadable version remains available here.

The OpenX plug-in framework is coming

Our tech team is now hard at work extending OpenX’s flexibility further with OpenX 2.7.

2.7 is focused on a comprehensive plug-in framework that will make OpenX even more easily customizable and extensible. We’re expecting to deliver a public beta in the coming month.

We have already been working with a great small group of alpha testers from within our developer community. We would love to engage with more people from within the community to help develop exciting, new features for our users. If you’d like to get involved, Chris Nutting leads our community developer efforts – you can reach him on IRC or the forums.

Lastly, stay tuned for updates on the OpenX Market

The OpenX Market is a new project to help publishers sell their ad space for full and fair value.

You can participate in the pilot program by making your ad space available for bidding through OpenX Hosted. There’s no cost, nothing to lose and its super-simple to participate. Learn more here.

We very much hope everything we have done over the past few months and are now working on is really going to help everyone in our community grow their business by making your online advertising efforts easier and better.

We’re also confident there are bunch of things we could be doing better :). We’d love to hear from you, whether you’re happy with something, want to get more involved in the community, have a question, a suggestion or a criticism.

The more we hear from you, the better we can be.

Thanks