Today we’re delighted to announce the launch of the newest version of OpenX Ad Server. More than any OpenX update so far, OpenX 2.8 is a major step in helping us help you to grow your business online.
Among the many new features in 2.8 is our plugin framework, which allows you to customize OpenX Ad Server in literally limitless ways. You can build your own plugins, use existing plugins built by the OpenX community or have folks like OpenX Consultants build them for you. And you can expect lots of new functionality via plugins like video ads and mobile over the next few months!
Another key feature of 2.8 is the new OpenX Market plugin, which allows you to seamlessly flow your inventory directly into OpenX Market to maximize your revenue. It’s very easy because the Market is now natively integrated into the ad server. It’s risk free because a Market ad will only ever show if it beats your existing campaigns’ CPM. And it’s revenue maximizing because it flows your ad inventory into a large, open market where multiple classes of advertisers bid for each impression in a full real-time auction.
Key benefits of 2.8 include:
Easier Customization: The plugin framework allows you to customize your ad technology and build any plugin you need. You also have access to additional plugins developed by the OpenX community, OpenX and third parties.
Revenue Maximization: The OpenX Market plugin allows you to maximize revenue by flowing your inventory directly into OpenX Market.
eCPM Optimization: You can further maximize your advertising revenue by using an entirely new eCPM-based revenue optimization system for ad serving prioritization across your remnant CPM, CPC and CPA campaigns.
Improved Scalability: Raw data storage has been overhauled by a re-architected distributed statistics technology (bucket logging) to provide significantly improved scalability and reduced storage requirements.
Enhanced Usability: The first time you log in to OpenX 2.8, you’ll see significant UI improvements to make OpenX even easier to use.
If you’d like to download OpenX 2.8, immediately begin to take advantage of all its features and gain instant access to OpenX Market, please click here. To upgrade to 2.8 from any prior version of OpenX, please click here.
Or, if you’d prefer to take full advantage of the benefits of using OpenX while letting us run the software on our infrastructure, please click here to learn more about OpenX Hosted.
Lastly, thank you very, very much indeed to all the many members of the OpenX community who suggested ideas, tested the Beta, provided feedback and worked on the translations for the new version of OpenX. Thank you so much!
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.
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!
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!
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 our open source ad server.
This release (v2.4.7) resolves 23 bugs including improved delivery performance when using companion positioning and fixes to campaign delivery and campaign analysis reporting.
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.
The OpenX team has released an update to our open source ad server.
This release (v2.4.6) resolves 41 bugs including fixes to email report generation, new settings to control raw data logging and improvements to Flash banner conversions.
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.
The OpenX team has released an update to our open source ad server.
This release (v2.4.5) includes improvements to the campaign delivery algorithms, SWF support, distributed statistics and more. We’ve added support to block impressions from selected User-Agents too.
As always, we’d like to send out our thanks to everyone who has helped us to identify and resolve issues.
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