IAB’s Rising Stars
As announced last week, OpenX is supporting the six new Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Rising Stars ad units. As a publisher you can now sell these ad units in OpenX Market. Rising Stars ad units encourage a shift away from several smaller ads on a page to fewer, larger ads on a page. The Rising Stars ad units include:

- Billboard, 970×250
- Filmstrip, 300×3000 filmstrip served through the IAB UAP 300×600
- Portrait
- Pushdown, featuring a 970×90 teaser
- Sidekick, an expanding unit that ‘pushes’ editorial content leftward
- Slider, a floating banner that then ‘slides’ in the full ad upon user click or rollover

See the full profile on each unit here. As part of this transition, OpenX will no longer offer standard support for the recently delisted IAB standard sizes. However, they are still manageable via custom sizes.

Quality Settings
Publishers and networks now have the ability to configure ad quality settings at the site- and account-level. This currently applies only to demand from OpenX Market. Users with appropriate capabilities will now be able to edit: buyer filters, brand filters, domain filters, blocked ad categories, blocked creative types, blocked content attributes, and blocked ad languages.

Reporting Changes
All existing reports with geographic breakouts will now also include the ability to filter results based on a specific geography, which might include a city, state, DMA, or country. Additionally, all reports will now include a summary row indicating total or average values for performance metrics. You’ll now be able to create more detailed reports with access to more specific geographic segmentation.

Self-Managed Publisher Experience
A new feature is available to enable publishers to manage the inventory that they send to an ad exchange or ad network. This type of publisher – referred to as a ‘self-managed publisher’ – has access to a dashboard, reporting, inventory management, and account payment information (accessible only to accounts with type ‘Publisher with Inventory Management’).

We hope you’ve found this information useful. Please stay tuned for the next set of updates from our Product Team in coming months.

Matt Plummer is Vice President of Product Management at OpenX.

It has been brought to our attention that there is a vulnerability in the 2.8 downloadable version of OpenX that can result in a server running the downloaded version of OpenX being compromised. We have already closed this vulnerability with the latest version of our software. To avoid this issue, we recommend that all users immediately upgrade their systems to 2.8.7.

OpenX also provides both free and Enterprise hosted versions of the ad server. Both of these products are managed and operated by the OpenX team, including upgrades, maintenance, and security scans, freeing you and your team from handling such issues. If ad serving is mission-critical to your business, we suggest contacting our team to learn more about OpenX Enterprise.

When operating any software, especially software that interacts with the public, it is important to keep up to date with the latest version. And, as always, please let us know of any potential security problems by emailing security@openx.org.

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!

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.

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!

That is a load of publishers in just a few short months. Woohoo!

10k OpenX publishers - we have only begun!

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!

Sign-up to try OpenX Hosted and join the OpenX mailing list for updates.

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.

Find out more from the release notes, or download the latest version of OpenX today.

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.

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