OpenX Blog

Search advertising is very mature - there is a well structured data model for advertisers to use. Interestingly, display advertising still does not have a structured model for using the data exposed from websites - it is still a largely fragmented market. This needs to change in order for websites - especially small and medium sized websites - to make more money from online advertising.

When an advertiser buys ads based on no data (e.g. ‘blind’), this means that the advertiser has no clue of the following things:

• What time of day (or how evenly distributed) the impressions will occur
• Which websites will display the ads
• What types of users will be viewing the ads

If data is provided to the advertiser, (e.g. the ads will display during the day on Digg for tech focused males), the price advertisers pay can increase up to 10x or more for the same ads.

That is a big price difference!

The more data transparency that advertisers have about the site, users, and timeframe, the less risk they associate with the purchase, and therefore the price advertisers are willing to pay increases. In addition, organizing data into simple straightforward structures that advertisers understand will again increase revenues.

The process of exposing and organizing website data is called ‘expression’. There are a number of types of expression that can be done by website publishers:

Content Expression
There are a number of parameters that can be exposed about website content. For example, letting advertisers know the URL of the page gives amazing insight into the type of user and their frame of mind when viewing advertising. Furthermore, packaging a website in terms of category, keyword, expertise level, etc., will give advertisers a strong sense of what types of users they are reaching.

Demographic Expression
Demographic expression refers to attributes about the user viewing the website. The easiest data to gather is the country, city, time zone, etc., where the user is located (OpenX uses geo plugins to provide this information). If a website stores other demographic information about users, such as age and income bracket, gender, etc., this is also extremely useful to advertisers.

Behavior Expression
By ‘remembering’ the way users behaved in the past, valuable insight can be provided to advertisers. For example, if a user looked at a VW Jetta the last time she was at an automobile site, this information can be valuably shared with an auto advertiser on the next visit - even when the viewer is browsing other, less lucrative pages on the site. In addition, a user’s behavior on multiple sites can be stored - providing even more value to advertisers.

Beyond the expression of site data, there are a few things that a website must also consider:

Privacy
It is very important to be completely straightforward with website users about how their information is used. This includes providing a simple, easy to read privacy policy that details what information is provided to advertisers, and in what form (non-personally identifiable information, aggregate information, etc.)

Organization
One of the most important considerations before undergoing site expression is how expression is organized. Some large websites (like the Comscore 100) can get away with expressing their site however they wish - because there is so much inventory, advertisers will take the time to understand unique attributes of the site. Small or medium sized websites do not have that luxury.

How Can OpenX Help?

• Introduce Standards - making similar ways of expressing inventory for all websites will make it easier for agencies to buy inventory at higher CPM’s.
• Data Services - by allowing publishers to pass user data to advertisers (if they wish), advertisers will know more about the people viewing the website, thus making the website more attractive to advertisers.
• CMS Integration - OpenX is working on integrating inside content management systems and blogs in a seamless way, so that inventory and data can be expressed by default.

These services will be a first step in our mission of increasing transparency and getting an increased, fair market value for advertising in the OpenX publisher community.

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.

See the release notes for more details or download the latest OpenX beta today!

My role at OpenX is to lead the OpenX community, and drive the product vision, while my title remains ‘CTO’. A ‘true’ CTO would spend more time on the OpenX architecture, designing and leading development of a next-generation technical infrastructure. A better title for my job will be ‘Community Leader’.

We need to hire a CTO who can own the technology vision, and lead our excellent team of engineers to build OpenX to greater levels. As you can imagine, this is a very important position, and one that I personally will take a lot of time and effort to find the right person.

More details about the kind of person we are looking for are below. In summary, we are looking for an experienced, practical, energetic person who has previously built a huge global internet application, who wants to truly change the online advertising world.

Working at OpenX is a unique experience. We are a start-up that has tens of thousands of businesses globally depending upon us for their core revenue. We are positioned to transform a confusing online advertising marketplace into one that is transparent, efficient and open.

OpenX CTO Job Description

Responsibilities:

The CTO is the owner and driver of OpenX’s global technology vision and execution

Ideal Characteristics:

• Proven track record building and leading a world-class technology team
• Ability to develop and clearly articulate a compelling technology vision and inspire the team and community
• Strongly architectural mindset and approach. Ability to see the forest through the trees
• Global operating experience and outlook
• Experience building products for large communities of users
• Experience managing multiple parallel development work streams from concept to design and implementation and ongoing refinement
• Direct experience of deploying architecture and systems at great scale (e.g. 10K+ transactions per second) with very high availability and low cost
• Experience managing individuals and teams conducting complex, science-based algorithmic and optimization work
• Strong business partnership. Our executive management team need a real partner, not a requirements ‘order taker’! This means that the CTO must be very commercially “aware” and able help shape our business direction
• Experience in the online advertising space, especially: ad serving, ad targeting, marketplace design, yield optimization, self-serve participation, large scale transactions infrastructure etc
• An Open Source guru who is comfortable working with and managing developers around the world is a major plus
• Deep passion to transform the game and win

Please let us know if you know someone who fits the bill. Please send inquiries to hr@openx.org.

The OpenX Team has been quietly working away on an OpenX plugin for Joomla!. In fact, we now have a working prototype and we need feedback. With this in mind, we are planning a live demo next Wednesday at the OpenX office in London.

Who is invited?
We would love for London based publishers to come and visit our office and attend the session. For those who can’t come in, we also have a limited number of seats available to join the session online.

How do I register?
Please complete this short registration survey. We’ve included a couple of questions about what you would expect from an OpenX plugin for Joomla!

What other ways can I get involved?
There will be lots of other opportunities to help out. Please join the OpenX Publisher Feedback group if you would like to help the product team develop new products and features.

How can I track your progress?
Keep an eye on our blog or join our mailing list to keep up to date with OpenX product news and community announcements.

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Related News:
Joomla! recently interviewed Scott and discussed how Joomla! and OpenX are working together. Read the full interview here.

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.

This new version of OpenX introduces some exciting new featuresto help you:

• 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.

Find out more about the beta programme or download the beta and start testing today.

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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

Over the last few months, we have spent time sorting through all of the opportunities, features, and priorities that we have, and distilling these down to a clear roadmap of what OpenX plans to deliver in the coming months. It took a lot of time to deliver a simple result.

Here are the priorities for OpenX in 2008:

Stability
Our current version of OpenX, v2.4, is the first stable release since the release of phpAdsNew in 2002. Almost everything (except the interface!) has changed. We need to work on making the core OpenX server as stable as ever. We currently have about 120 outstanding bugs, and more unverified bugs from the forums that we are making a top priority to get resolved. (UPDATE: v2.4 has around 25 outstanding bugs, and the remainder are bugs for v2.5 beta)

Simplicity
Over the years, we have added many new features to an already full-featured product. We are working on moving many of the more ‘expert’ features to be optional plug-ins (check out the ‘Integration’ section below), as well as modifying the user interface and workflow to be as simple and efficient as possible. Our efforts simplifying (or eliminating) installation or upgrade fall into this category as well.

Integration
There are many people who leverage OpenX by customizing the code to work within their other systems (e.g. CMS, CRM, Financial, etc.). The problem with customizing the core code is that upgrading OpenX becomes harder when new versions are released. We have identified features which will make integration and customization of OpenX easier, including a Web Services API, Plugin Framework, and Template System.

The goal here is to make it very simple for anyone to create modifications to OpenX - and to donate their work back to the OpenX community!

Efficiency
Over the last few years, we have successfully scaled OpenX to serve many billions of ads per month. However, the infrastructure required to do this is quite complicated. We want to decrease the resources (servers, disk space, etc.) required to serve large ad volumes, as well as simplify the infrastructure needed in order to scale to huge volumes.

Why are these things important to us?
We would like to prepare OpenX for the next level - to make a solid foundation for the OpenX community to build upon. We will then become the platform for publishers, big and small, with simple or sophisticated needs, to use to manage their online advertising.

Please let us know if we are on the right track. Stay tuned for more specifics on features.

After lots of blog comments, emails, and IRC / IM messages, the verdict is in.

We are going to support PHP 4 and PHP 5 for our upcoming version, 2.5 beta/2.6 stable. All subsequent versions, starting with 2.7, will have PHP 5 support only (the specific version of PHP 5 has not been decided yet).

Go PHP5!

Update:
Just to be clear on the versions: While we are in alpha/beta stages for v2.5, we have committed to PHP 4 support for this version. This will be the version that people will download once it is stable, in 3 months or so.

The next version, v2.7, will be the version that will support PHP 5 only. This version will probably be stable toward the end of 2008. I hope this gives you more of a sense of our time frames.

Over the years, there has been quite an effort to support as many versions of PHP and MySQL as possible. This makes it easier for publishers to install OpenX with as little hassle as possible. In the past year, there has been a large effort to convince web applications and web hosts to drop support for PHP 4. In fact, the PHP folks have announced the end of life of PHP 4 (sniff, sniff), with security fixes stopping on 8/8/08.

While it is only a matter of time before we drop PHP 4 support, we are considering removing support for versions of OpenX above v2.5. If this decision is made, this will mean that from May/June 2008, OpenX will require PHP 5.

Here are some of the reasons:

Pros

• Faster time to develop
• Simpler, more maintainable code
• Better libraries (most PHP libraries are now being developed only for PHP 5)
• Our new plugin system can take advantage of PHP 5 tools and libraries
• Test cycles take much shorter (automated tests do not need to run over all iterations of PHP 4)

Cons

• Publishers with PHP 4 will either have to upgrade PHP or switch hosting providers if they want to move to versions of OpenX beyond v2.5

Who does this affect?

When we did analysis of who would be affected, we looked at publishers who are on a recent version of OpenX (2.3 and above). Roughly 65% of these users are already using PHP 5.

In addition, people who do not have the technical expertise to upgrade to PHP 5 can use our hosted version (when it comes out of beta!).

Please let me know in the comments or through our email address (hello at openx dot org) what your thoughts are. Please be specific why you want to keep or drop support for PHP 4.

We really want community involvement in this decision.

Thanks.

Over the past two weeks, I have met over 40 publishers, ad networks, exchanges, aggregators, and other people close to the online advertising industry, in London, San Francisco, and New York. I try to meet people in the industry as much as possible, but I don’t think that I have had this many meetings in such a concentrated time frame ever. Yes, this means that I averaged 4 meetings per day for two straight weeks.

The goal of these meetings was to get feedback on some new product initiatives that we have been thinking about. There is no substitute to designing product with the customers that are going to be users. The input we received has been incredibly helpful. Thank you to everyone who we have met - your feedback is much appreciated.

During most of the meetings, I asked people the following questions:

What would you change about the Openads ad server?
How do you think Openads should evolve in the future?

It is amazing how much feedback you can get from such open-ended questions. Feedback came back not necessarily answering my questions, but more asking how people can work with and adapt Openads:

Can I use Openads to serve video? What types?
Do you have plans for a mobile ad server?
Can I use Openads to power my ad network?
How can I contribute my modifications back to Openads?

Openads is typically used to power the advertising for a website. In other words, it is typically a publisher ad server. Almost every single instance of Openads is used in this way. However, over time, we get tons of requests (and lots of real world examples too!) to use Openads in a different manner.

Basically, we have plans to add all of these features into Openads. But - is this the right thing?

Why would a small website that rotates Google AdSense with Advertising.com care about conversion tracking? Why would a mobile provider care about rich media video? Why would an advertiser want advanced inventory management?

A single version of Openads cannot be all things to all people. If we continue down this path, Openads will work for everybody, and will be usable for nobody. In addition, if Openads does not foster community (e.g. developer AND user) support for these features, they will stay on the roadmap and not be built.

How do we find a solution that will work for everybody?

Create a plugin system.
We have spent a huge amount of time rewriting major parts of Openads so that the code is more modular, understandable, and maintainable. For example, we created a single Data Access Layer. What this means is that we spent the time to move all of the database calls into a single place. It took lots of time to do this (look at the phpAdsNew 2.0 code if you don’t believe me). However, we have seen the fruits of our labor. We have been able to quickly add a Web Service API, and support for Postgres DB by plugging these features directly into our data access layer.

We need to expand our efforts to include all parts of the application into our plugin system.

Move some Openads functionality to plugins.
After creating a system of plugins, the next logical step is to move many of the ‘fringe’ features of Openads into plugins. For example, Openads has conversion tracking functionality that most publishers do not use (it is mainly an advertiser feature). This would be an excellent candidate to move into a plugin.

The overall goal is to create a core ad server that is generic in nature, with plugins that will make it fit to a specific user’s requirements.

Identify the major types of uses of Openads.
Based on feedback, surveys, and other data, I can safely hypothesize that the major ways people use Openads are:
a) simple publisher ad server
b) advanced publisher ad server
c) ad network ad server
d) mobile ad server
e) rich media ad server

Create a community around each user type
Once it is easy to understand and modify Openads for developers, we need to create a robust development community around each type of use. This way, there is no limitation for using Openads for any purpose.

Conclusion
In short, we cannot be all things to all people. There are so many ways to use Openads, and so many features to build, that we cannot be successful without the community helping out. Our strategy to do this is to make it easy for the community to modify Openads, build plugins on top of Openads, and to link Openads into larger infrastructures.

Please let us know your feedback, suggestions, or ways you would like to get involved.

Just a quick update to let you all know that our SVN/Trac server is about to move to a new hosting centre. The outage should be no more than a couple of hours.