OpenX Blog

Lord Matt shares his experiences managing websites in a series of articles titled how I manage multiple blogs.

Like many publishers, Lord Matt uses OpenX to maximise his ad revenue by rotating ads and comparing their performance.

He also talks about tools which help him do more with less, something which is close to many website owners hearts and it only gets more important as their online advertising needs become more and more sophisticated.

OpenX is popular tool for website owners wanting to save time and maximise their ad revenue. Find out how on our website:

• How to rotate banners using OpenX
• How to compare the performance of banners using OpenX
• OpenX product tour

In the fast-paced, ever-changing world of consumer electronics, Digital Trends helps us choose solutions tailored to suit our individual needs. One of the most trusted names in technology, the company publishes an online magazine covering gadgets, appliances and high-tech trends so that shoppers can make better purchasing decisions. Its website features a variety of videos, reviews, guides, news and other types of articles, all devoted to the amazing digital toys and gadgets which we simply can’t live without. Whatever the hot new product on the market is, they’re bound to have it covered.

Digital Trends has been in business for about 8 years and uses OpenX to deliver ads on their website. The firm syndicates its content to partners such as Yahoo, MSN, WorldNow (which operates approximately 50% of the local TV station websites in the US), FutureShop Canada (the largest consumer electronics retailer in Canada), and Google. Ad volumes on any typically given day come to between 500,000 and 700,000. And, as Dan Gaul of Digital Trends stresses, right now is the slow time of the year, coming right after the holiday season, but we’re sure it will pick up quickly as our credit cards recover from the ordeals of the Christmas period.

So you’ve seen ‘Open water’ and you are still interested in diving into the deep blue sea? Then the DeeperBlue.net website is for you. Whether you are a total beginner looking for some ideas or an experienced diver with a craving for cutting edge equipment. DeeperBlue.net will keep you in touch with news covering sports events and affairs in the submarine universe, galleries capturing extraordinary scenes, courses on offer and forums as well as shopping where you can grab real bargains. Freediving, scuba, spearfishing and technical diving…they have it all.

DeeperBlue.net use Openads to deliver their banner ads and they have been using Openads for years now. We asked DeeperBlue.net if they would recommend Openads for other web publishers: ‘Yes, it’s an open-source, free, enterprise level ad server and it is absolutely brilliant!’

MijnAlbum are an innovative online photo sharing website. They host over 50 million photos and provide value added services to 800,000 registered users.

I asked Jappie about his experiences using Openads and about their ad templating system.

OA: Hi Jappie, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Jappie: It’s great to hear from you and to see such a vast increase in activity, marketing & development around the Openads product of late!

OG: It sounds like you’re a long time user of Openads.

Jappie: Yes, we have been using Openads (then phpAdsNew) since 2004. At that stage one of my company’s founders was working at another top website in the Netherlands. He suggested we try it out and we’ve been using it ever since.

OG: Tell us a little about MijnAlbum?

Jappie: MijnAlbum is one of 100 most popular websites in the Netherlands and is #1 in the area of photo sharing. It’s also the cheapest photo-printing provider in the Netherlands.

We have approximately 360,000 active sharing members and a total of approximately. 800,000 registered accounts. In a typical day, around 140,000 photos are uploaded in high-resolution and shared in a variety of ways. We allow members to do things like setup their own domain name to show their photos, send photos to mobile phones and print them on things like t-shirts, curtains, canvas etc…

Recently we added the option to plot photos on a Google-map. Now over 50,000 photos are tagged with a location. We are planning more cutting-edge technologies with photos in the future.

OG: What advertising do you carry on MijnAlbum?

Jappie: Openads serves around 400 million ad impressions each month including banner and textlink ads.

Most of our impressions are contracted by our sales-team. We create most of the banners we run ourselves too. Openads is flexible enough to be able to handle any kind of banner so we are able create promotions which suit every advertiser.

We are also dynamically personalizing banners with images, movies and text using a templating system we added to Openads. This has had positive effect on click-through rate and, ultimately, increased sales.

For example, we can include photos in Flash-movies and show visitors their photos scrolling through a printer or hanging on the wall of a room seconds after they uploaded these photos to our site! They love it.

OG: That’s a clever idea, I’m sure other Openads users would be interested to hear how you implemented that.

Jappie: It’s really quite a simple system.

We extended the Openads local mode invocation-technique so that it loads ad through a templating-engine.

We include custom tags (for example [LastUploadedPhoto]) in our ads as instructions for what content should be inserted.

When Openads serves the banner, our PHP-code detects and replace the tags with the dynamic content and outputs the final banner, textlink or Flash movie.

OG: What are the most important features of Openads for you?

Jappie: From a technical standpoint: efficiency and being able to load ads directly into PHP for our templating system.

Being able to extend the Openads local mode invocation-technique has been critical in allowing us to deliver truly dynamic and cutting-edge banners at *lightning* fast speeds!

Furthermore, we find it very useful to be able to target at keywords. Around 97% of the photos in our database are tagged with a category-keyword. We can attach keywords to our campaigns and target them to be served above relevant photo albums. This targeting has another been another big win for click-through rates.

Finally, Openads scales perfectly across our 30+ load balanced web servers and yet it is efficient enough to run on only 1 database server-backend!

OG: Thanks Jappie, it’s been very interesting talking with you. Thanks for telling us about how you’re using Openads at MijnAlbum and, especially, your templating system.

Jappie: Thank you for your time. I think Openads is the best ad-solution there is. It is extremely dynamic and expandable when you integrate it into a native PHP-website. The fact that it comes free is remarkable. Good luck in the future!

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Related posts:

• 5 steps to beat the basic ad network eCPM
• Optimize your website for higher revenue

Introducing another Openads competition winner: Alberto from Axura SRL in Italy

OA: Thanks for downloading Openads and signing up to win an Openads t-shirt. We’re pleased to announce that you won.

Alberto: Wow, what a lucky break. Thank you very much!

OA: I understand you have a long history using Openads.

Alberto: Yes, I’ve been using Openads since 1999. At that time the project was called phpAds and it was being developed by Tobias Ratschiller. Later, I had the pleasure to work with him at Maguma, aah the old days! (Hello Tobias if you’re out there)

Anyway, I’m really impressed by the progress the project has made.

OA:How are you using Openads today?

Alberto: I own a web agency in Italy called Axura SRL. We offer advertising solutions to our customers using Openads and AdWords. We manage ad campaigns for many corporate clients and help them to increase their revenue.

OA: Can you tell us about a website you’ve used Openads on recently

Alberto: I’m working on project which uses Openads at the moment actually. It is a webzine for teenagers but, unfortunately, I can’t tell you its name yet.

The site has dozens of of authors and lots of different sections. Openads is flexible enough to allow us to offer unparalleled functionality and also empowers our customer with a management tool which really has no peers, even among commercial products.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Alberto – the t-shirt’s in the mail.

We’d like to introduce another Openads competition winner John from Operation Photo Rescue

OA: Congratulations John, you’ve won an Openads t-shirt.

John: Thanks! I’ll wear it proudly.

OA: Have you been using Openads for long?

John: Yes, I’ve been using Openads for years now and I’m currently integrating Openads 2.3 beta into a new website called Operation Photo Rescue.

OA: Tell us a little more about Operation Photo Rescue

John: Operation Photo Rescue is a worldwide group of photo restoration volunteers who are restoring pictures damaged by natural disasters FOR FREE. After our volunteers restore the damaged photos, we then have a couple of printing shops that print them and send them back to their owners, again at no cost.

We started OPR right after Hurricane Katrina and we are still restoring images to this day. We are going to be going back down to Biloxi, MS at the end of August to get more pictures to fix. Openads will be a big part of the next phase of our site.

(more…)

We’d like to introduce another Openads competition winner… Andy from Social Knowledge

OA: Thanks for downloading Openads 2.3 beta and signing up to win an Openads t-shirt! We’re pleased to announce that you’ve won a t-shirt.

OA: Tell us about your websites

Andy: Social Knowledge connects people with similar interests and lets them harness the distributed expertise of focused peer communities. At the heart of all Social Knowledge Networks are people and technology. The participants collaborate and manage their community while constantly providing feedback that is used to shape and extend the features of each peer community network.

Our most popular community is The Fashion Spot.

The communities are provided to the members for free and the costs are offset by the advertisements. We serve around 60 million impressions each month

OA: Have you been using Openads for long

Andy: I’ve been using Openads since 2004, this year I’ve been ramping things up to taking control of my inventory - Openads is an important part of this.

Forums communities have very high page views but very low click through rates. We needed an ad serving solution that can scale but also allows us to keep our costs down, Openads was the perfect combination.

OA: How much time to you spend managing your inventory each week?

Andy: Not as much as I would like. At the moment I’m running a mix of ad networks and direct sales but I’d like to do more to make sure I’m getting the best value from my inventory.

OA: What do you think of the Openads 2.3 beta?

Andy: The new Openads is great because it allows us to use one installation to run the ads for all of our communities; they are each setup as an agency. This provides us benefits of not having to maintain many instances of the software which ultimately saves us money. We are also starting to use Geotargeting and URL targeting to provide more relevant ads for our users to enhance their experience on our communities.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Andy – the t-shirt’s in the mail.

We have our second t-shirt competition winner… Tim Turner from New Zealand.

OA: Thanks for downloading Openads and signing up to win an Openads t-shirt! We’re pleased to announce that you’ve won a t-shirt.

Tim: Hey, that’s pretty cool!

OA: What’s your experience using Openads?

Tim: I work as a Development Manager at Enform, a specialist web-technologies provider and developer in New Zealand. Our company has developed web technologies that allow the media industry to integrate all media including the Internet and print media.

We have been using Openads for a couple of years now.

Both www.thecaryard.co.nz, a popular nationwide vehicle search site, and www.gobuild.co.nz, a Builder Directory and Show home information site run Openads. At present we are serving approx 500,000 ad views per month.

OA: Have you tried the Openads 2.3 beta? What did you think?

Tim: Yes, I downloaded 2.3 beta and I’m currently in the process of having a look at it.

My initial response on the new beta is that it looks really good! I didn’t have any problems installing it or getting it going.

One of the features of most interest to us is conversion tracking. We have had advertisers asking for this, so I’m looking forward to getting it up and running.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Tim – the t-shirt’s in the mail.

Our first t-shirt competition winner is Rafael Dohms, a PHP Engineer from Brazil.

OA: Congratulations Rafael, you’ve won an Openads t-shirt!

Rafael: Wow, this is great! I never win anything!

OA: Tell us a little about how you use Openads

Rafael: I’ve been using Openads for over 4 years now both commercially and on my blog

OA: What do you think of the Openads 2.3 beta?

Rafael: I tried out the 2.3 beta this week and now it’s installed on my blog.

Rafael: It’s great! Lots of new features and much easier to install. I’m looking forward to the 2.3 official release. I’m already recommending it to my business contacts.

OA: Thanks for speaking with us Rafael and thanks for recommending Openads!