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
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