The latest version of the OpenX Ad Server, OpenX 2.8.4, is now available for download!  You can get it here and try it out for yourself.  This version includes a number of significant enhancements around making it even easier for you to make more ad revenue. To get more info, check out our posting on the new features and benefits in OpenX 2.8.4.

You can also take advantage of all the latest OpenX 2.8.4 features by signing up for OpenX Community Hosted or contacting sales about OpenX Enterprise. ]]> http://blog.openx.org/01/openx-284-is-available-for-download/feed/ http://blog.openx.org/01/openx-284-new-ways-to-help-you-make-more-money/ http://blog.openx.org/01/openx-284-new-ways-to-help-you-make-more-money/#comments Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:47:41 +0000 James Kung http://blog.openx.org/?p=2721 We’re excited to launch a new release of OpenX today that makes it even easier to make more money, OpenX 2.8.4. This release is now available for OpenX Community Hosted and we’ll be making it available for OpenX Download later this week.  Both Hosted and Download users will find OpenX 2.8.4 loaded with new features that make it easier to serve ads and maximize revenue right away.

If you’re a download user, you’ll immediately notice a more streamlined Install and Upgrade Wizard. This new wizard reduces the install/upgrade process into five easy steps, making it much easier to get the ad server up and running as quickly as possible.

We’ve also built an Inventory Setup Wizard, available to Hosted and Download users alike, to simplify the process of creating a website and generating ad tags.  This wizard is accessible through the left navigation menu under the Inventory tab.

New Ways to Earn More Money from Your Ads

OpenX 2.8.4 also comes with major enhancements to the way it integrates with OpenX Market, giving you new and easier ways to earn more revenue across your site’s ad space.  There are now three ways you can make money from OpenX Market:

1. Opting in Existing Campaigns to OpenX Market — Just like in previous versions of OpenX, you can still opt in your existing campaigns to OpenX Market while providing a floor price for each campaign.  Since OpenX Market only serves ads when it exceeds your floor price, this is an easy way to augment revenue from your campaigns.  To opt in a campaign, select the OpenX Market checkbox for the campaign.  Or use the OpenX Market Quickstart screen to opt in multiple campaigns.

2. Creating Campaigns with the OpenX Market Advertiser — You’ll notice a new advertiser in the system called OpenX Market Advertiser. Through this advertiser, you can create campaigns that exclusively serve OpenX Market ads — each ad request will be filled directly by the highest paying ad from OpenX Market. These campaigns are just like contract campaigns: you have control over flight dates, impression goals, and priority. You can even add delivery limitations. This makes it possible to traffic ads from OpenX Market the same way you would traffic your other ads. To get started, just click “Add new campaign” next to the OpenX Market Advertiser.

3. Using OpenX Market as a default ad provider for your zones — In addition to the ability to create OpenX Market campaigns, we’re also introducing a better way to avoid serving blank ads. Each of your zones will now have an option to automatically serve ads from OpenX Market if no other ads are available for the zone. This saves you the frustration of blank ads and ensures you get paid even when you’re unable to fill an ad request from your own campaigns. You can enable this setting on the Zone Properties tab for any zone.

A Better View of Your OpenX Market Stats

OpenX Market stats are now integrated into the stats screens for all of your other ads. This makes viewing stats much easier by allowing you to see your Market stats in the same view as your regular stats. So when you’re looking at stats for advertisers and campaigns, you’ll see OpenX Market Advertiser as one of the advertisers listed. Underneath this advertiser you will see all ads from OpenX Market broken out into three categories.

1. Ads from campaigns you opted into OpenX Market.  These will appear under OpenX Market - Opted In Campaigns.
2. Ads from campaigns you created directly with the OpenX Market Advertiser.  These will appear broken out by each OpenX Market Campaign you created.
3. Ads served to zones that had no other ads to serve.  These will appear under OpenX Market - Zone Default Ads.

For OpenX Enterprise users: you will see these ads further broken out by each advertiser in OpenX Market.

OpenX 2.8.4 also provides OpenX Community Hosted customers with further enhancements for ad prioritization for contract campaigns.  When all banner weights in a single contract campaign are set to ‘1′, OpenX Auto Weighting will be enabled and will ensure smooth delivery of the overall campaign instead of each individual ad.

Please check out all these new features for yourself today. If you’re not using OpenX yet, get started right away by signing up for OpenX Community Hosted or contacting sales to get started with OpenX Enterprise.

Download our study on Direct Ad Selling Practices.

We’re hopeful the study provides some helpful tips to your business.  And if you have feedback on direct ad selling practicies that have been particularly successful for you, feel free to let us know.

The OpenX Video Plugin enables you to traffic your own video ads through OpenX together with your flash media player and media provider. It follows the IAB VAST standard and supports inline video ads, i.e., pre/mid/post-roll ads, and overlay ads, i.e., image, swf, text or HTML ads that display on top of the main video stream. It also allows you to track statistics for VAST-specific events related to your video ads (pauses, mutes, quartile views, etc.). And for remnant campaigns, it provides the ability to serve one companion banner per video ad.

Since this is the first version of the OpenX Video Plugin, it is intended to serve your own video ads only and does not include the ability to integrate video ads coming from ad networks. We will be working to evolve the plugin to include more features like this in the next version.

Please be sure to read through the following documentation on getting started with the OpenX Video Plugin.

Relevant Documentation

• Introduction to the OpenX Video Plugin
• Step-by-step guide on serving your first ad with the OpenX Video Plugin
• Guide to statistics for video ads

Please note: Serving video ads also requires you to use a VAST plugin on your video player in order to schedule the ads for your player and translate the responses coming from the OpenX Video Plugin. If you use Flowplayer or JW Player as your video player, you can use the Open Ad Streamer Plugin from the Open Video Ads project for this purpose. If you use a custom flash media player, you can use the Open Video Ads VAST Actionscript 3 Framework to develop your own custom VAST compliant video player plugin.  Visit the Open Video Ads project to learn more about these options.

Check out the OpenX Video Plugin today and get started with serving video ads!

As you might have read, last week we were very pleased to announce an advertising technology partnership together with Microsoft.

Under this partnership OpenX and Microsoft will cross-market and promote products to our respective publisher bases. Specifically, Microsoft will refer publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions to OpenX and OpenX will promote Microsoft’s Content Ads service (which is a contextual advertising product) to OpenX publishers.

When we evaluated this partnership we thought, as we always do, about our core company goals. Those goals are very clear: to provide advertising technology that helps businesses grow online and help connect those businesses to revenue sources that help them make more money.

We feel this partnership really helps us make progress against those two goals.

First, it will help us enable more online businesses to grow by exposing our advertising technology to more potential customers via the referral arrangement with Microsoft.

Second, the Content Ads component of the partnership enables us to make another revenue option easily accessible to OpenX publishers. By integrating Content Ads into the OpenX Market, it will become another buyer competing for your inventory. We will also build a plugin for the ad server that will make it easy to sign up and use Content Ads. Of course this will totally be at your option.

We’re fired up about this partnership and are looking forward to making it very successful.

Please let us know your questions and thoughts.

We are very excited to be hosting the first ever ping pong tournament at ad:tech: The OpenX Open! Ping Pong has been a core part of our culture at OpenX since the beginning and we think this event will be a great opportunity to share and have some fun. It’s a doubles tournament and a number of companies have already entered their teams with hopes of taking the championship. There is room for 32 teams to compete, but the spots are going fast. You can sign up at our booth on Wednesday November 5th at Content Revenue Strategies at ad:tech or email me now at theopenxopen@openx.org and I can save your team a spot.

At 8:00 pm after the tournament, we will be hosting party at SPiN (www.spinnyc.com), the hottest ping pong club and bar in New York. We will be having some cocktails, hosting a singles ping pong tournament, and having a groovy time.

For more information on the tournament and the party, please visit The OpenX Open event page on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158855197890

And, while you’re there, please be sure to become a fan of OpenX on our main Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=openx&init=quick#/OpenX?ref=search&sid=729872722.1573061105..1

Game on!

We’d also like to remind you of our preferred web host, DreamHost, which we recommend using to host OpenX 2.8.2. Sign up here and be sure to use the promo code “OpenX” to get $20 off your first year.

So check out OpenX 2.8.2 to take advantage of the new enhancements. And for more information, check out the release notes here. Let us know what you think by sending us your feedback on the release.

• Improvements to ad delivery - With OpenX 2.8.2, we have made a number of changes to the delivery engine to ensure the proper allocation of ads across contract campaigns. The resulting improvements will reduce the occurrence of under-delivery and over-delivery for all contract campaigns.
• Improvements to campaigns using companion positioning - Prior to OpenX 2.8.2, once a “companion” campaign served one ad on a page, it prevented any other campaigns from serving ads on the page, regardless of whether the companion campaign could fill all of the page’s ads itself. In OpenX 2.8.2, we’ve fixed this behavior, so if there are ads on the page that the companion campaign is unable to serve, they will be offered to other campaigns (helping you avoid serving blanks).
• Security updates - We have completed a number of critical security updates to the ad server in OpenX 2.8.2 to reduce any potential vulnerabilities in the software.

In addition to these enhancements, we’ve made numerous additional performance improvements and bug fixes. Be sure to check out the release notes when they’re made available on Thursday.

If you are using OpenX Hosted, there’s more. In addition to upgrading the OpenX Hosted platform to OpenX 2.8.2 on Tuesday, we will be making further improvements throughout the next two weeks to significantly improve your experience on OpenX Hosted (update: see Market Plugin upgrade schedule).

• OpenX Market UI updates - This week, we’ll be updating how OpenX Hosted integrates with OpenX Market. You will be able to use tools like the OpenX Market Quickstart page and the Ad Quality Tool, which we previously launched for downloaded users (see this blog post). You will also be able to view details like your payment history.
• New and improved ad prioritization - Next week, we will be going live with a new process for prioritizing campaigns in OpenX Hosted. We’ve spent a number of months rewriting this process and have already rolled it out to some OpenX Enterprise Hosted clients with great success. With the new process in place, campaigns will deliver more accurately, the admin UI will be faster, and the system will prioritize contract campaigns in near real-time.
• New and improved reporting infrastructure - There will also be a number of updates to the way statistics are processed, making OpenX Hosted more in line with IAB requirements (we are in the final stages of certifying our Hosted platforms as IAB compliant). These changes will set the stage for further performance improvements to all statistics screens down the line.

We’re confident these updates will significantly improve performance and usability for all of you. Be sure to watch for them this coming week and as always we’ll be looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Here are the upcoming webinar dates and topics:

October 2 - Ad Networks presented by ValueClick Media

October 9 - Social Media for Success: Driving Traffic, Engagement, and Response from Leading Social Sites

October 16 - Email Marketing Best Practices: The Key To Targeted, Relevant Marketing

October 23 - Legal Affairs Best Practices for Small Publishers

The webinars will all be held on Fridays from 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm (Eastern). To take part in any of these events, please visit www.iab.net/longtail_webinars. Although there is no charge for you to attend, you do need to register in advance.

Stay tuned for even more great offers from OpenX and the IAB soon… In the meantime, enjoy the webinars!