This uplift in revenue has been great news for the OpenX community. Moguldom Media Group, which operates a collection of entertainment news websites, sends more than 50 million ads per month to OpenX Market and has been one of the Market’s early success stories.

According to Moguldom CEO Marve Frazier, “OpenX Market has actually become one of our most significant sources of revenue. We’re especially pleased with the revenue lift that we receive by having the Market beat our floor price.”

When you combine these results with the fact that the Market is risk-free — meaning the publisher sets a floor price that OpenX Market must exceed in order to show ads — you get a very compelling way to earn more ad revenue. And getting started with the Market is easy. Check out our new getting started pages (featuring step-by-step videos):

• For OpenX Hosted users -
  How to sell on OpenX Market using OpenX Hosted

• For OpenX Download users -
  How to sell on OpenX Market using OpenX Download

Start earning more from your ad space today by selling on OpenX Market!

To help you get better acquainted with the topic of prioritizing campaigns, we’re providing this video tutorial. It includes a review of campaign types as well as an overview of the different ways in which campaigns are prioritized. It also walks through eCPM prioritization, a powerful new feature introduced in OpenX 2.8.

Check out the video today and get started with prioritizing your campaigns.

• OpenX Market Quickstart - With the OpenX Market Quickstart screen (located on the Inventory tab), you can opt in multiple campaigns to OpenX Market with a single click. So if you’ve already created several campaigns and want to flow some of them into OpenX Market, you can do it all on one page. Furthermore, with Quickstart you can easily set a single floor price for all of your Market-enabled campaigns or different floors for each separate campaign.

• Ad Quality Tool - The Ad Quality Tool gives you more control over OpenX Market ads that get delivered to your websites. For each website, you can go to the OpenX Market Ad Quality Tool screen to see ads that have been served by OpenX Market onto that website. And if you see an ad you’d rather not display, you can block the OpenX Market advertiser campaign that was responsible for delivering that ad.
• Reassociating an OpenX.org account - We’ve now made it possible to reassociate an OpenX.org account to OpenX Market, even if you have to switch instances of OpenX Ad Server for any reason. This means if you have to reinstall OpenX or change servers, you will still be able to associate your original OpenX.org account to OpenX Market without any problems.

Take advantage of these features today by downloading OpenX 2.8.1. And if you are new to using OpenX Market, visit our Get Started with OpenX Market page to get up and running.

We’re obviously delighted to be able to do this in what is clearly a very tough time for many businesses and more specifically, a difficult time for early-stage companies to raise money.

I thought this was a good opportunity to spend a minute explaining what we are trying to achieve at OpenX and then put this financing in that context.

Our mission is simple - to help online businesses grow. We have two strategies to help us achieve that mission:

• Ad Technology. We aim to provide a very comprehensive, extremely flexible ad technology platform that 100,000s of businesses online can use to power their online advertising. Integral to this strategy is the flexibility our open-source approach enables, which allows our users to innovate on top of our platform and thereby truly define and drive their own product roadmaps.
• Ad Monetization. We aim to power an online advertising exchange that helps publishers make more money and ad buyers of all kinds (advertisers, agencies, networks) more easily target and buy media across a very broad swathe of publishers online.

Just in the last six months we have evolved quite a bit. For example, on the ad technology side, we:

• Now provide the OpenX platform in both hosted or download versions.
• Now offer premium services (premium hosted, premium support and professional services) to customers for whom these services make sense.
• Recently launched a major new release (2.8) with a rich set of new features, including a complete plug-in architecture to aid with extensions, eCPM optimization to help publishers make more money and improved stats scalability. And further updates are coming shortly.

And of course, on the ad monetization side, we formally launched OpenX Market in mid-April and we’re off to a really good start, increasing from 1 billion ad impressions to 2 billion in a month.

As a result of all this, we’ve seen terrific growth in both our user base and in our revenue lines, all of which are less than 6 months old.

However, we think we’re just getting started. We still have plenty to improve on and see an amazing opportunity ahead to help many 100,000s more businesses grow their online revenues by using OpenX ad technology and monetization products and services.

The new financing, which buttresses a significant amount of cash we still have from our last round, will help us carefully accelerate certain parts of our strategy when appropriate. It will also secure OpenX as we move steadily towards profitability and will make sure that OpenX is around for a long time as we further build out our products and the community of people and businesses who use them, extend them and contribute to them.

As ever, thanks so much for your support. Please use the products, give us feedback and get involved in the community - whether on the forums or IRC, as a contributor, plug-in developer, beta tester, translator or in simply spreading the word.

All the best
Tim

Wherever possible, we’re trying to build new features as plugins so that you don’t need to upgrade the whole ad server to take advantage of new features like the bundled plugin for OpenX Market, improved GeoIP targeting data from NetAcuity or an upcoming in-stream and overlay video ad plugin we will be including in the next ad server release.

There are currently four main ways that a plugin can interact with the ad server (mapping to the four main areas of the application):

• Web Service API - Plugins are able to define their own method calls to be accessed through the OpenX API
• Maintenance - Plugins can add tasks to the hourly process which summarizes statistics and assigns priorities
• User interface - Plugins can:
  • Add pages to the menu system to add new features and functionality
  • Define new types of banners
  • Generate custom invocation tags
  • Provide additional (Excel) reports
  • Override the user authentication system
• Delivery Engine: There are a number of hooks in the delivery engine at which plugins can register and execute custom code during the ad selection/rendering/logging process.
  • The front-controller allows new delivery scripts to be provided in a plugin
  • Sophisticated targeting rules can be evaluated to control banner delivery
  • Pre/post processing of a banner HTML
  • Events and actions (requests, impressions clicks etc) can trigger plugin events
  • Replace the file-based cache store with something else (e.g. memcache)

We’ve put together some tools to help budding plugin developers get started creating their first plugin including a toolbox with a plugin builder component and a demo plugin showing the kinds of things that can be done with the plugin framework.

And of course you can always jump into the #openx chatroom to ask (or offer) help!

We’ve worked hard to make OpenX Market as easy to use as possible, whether you are using OpenX Download or OpenX Hosted.

• For OpenX Download: OpenX Market is seamlessly integrated with OpenX 2.8, which includes the new OpenX Market plugin. This plugin installs automatically: you do not need to download any files apart from OpenX Ad Server. To access the Market, all you need to do is log in as the administrator and go to My Account > OpenX Market to associate your OpenX.org account.

• For OpenX Hosted: OpenX Market is already part of the product. From the campaign screen, you simply enable campaigns for OpenX Market with a single checkbox.

Check out these additional resources to help you learn more about using OpenX Market:

• OpenX Market Video Tutorial
• Get Started with OpenX Market page
• OpenX 2.8 User Guide for OpenX Market

Take a look and get started with maximizing your revenue through OpenX Market today!

eCPM prioritization maximizes your revenue by allocating requests to campaigns in proportion to their expected revenues and by spreading risk across different campaigns to adjust for volatile eCPM values. It works across your non-guaranteed CPM, CPC, and CPA campaigns to increase yield on any impression that isn’t allocated to a contract campaign.

When using eCPM optimization along with OpenX Market, you will get the most out of your existing relationships as well as supercede low value campaigns with higher priced offerings from OpenX Market’s direct advertisers, agencies and networks. The two combined form a very powerful yield generation and optimization toolset, using competition instead of daisy-chained guesses to bring you more money for your ad space.

Activating eCPM optimization within OpenX 2.8 is simple, fast and free. To learn more, please click here.

To download OpenX Ad Server 2.8, please click here.

Last week I gave a talk at Web 2.0 in San Francisco about this. The theme was why - despite plenty of gloom about the advertising space – we’re actually in a period of great innovation that is going to really drive value over the next couple of years.

I noted a couple of interesting trends, notably the current massive asymmetry in economic value creation between search vs. the rest. I proposed a few explanations for this.

I also shared a perspective on some of the important, emerging themes (or solutions) that are going to help drive longer-term economic value and mentioned some of the companies that are working in these spaces. The key themes covered:

1. The increasing importance of people > places.
2. The drive to deepen understanding of people’s interests and intent, not just their context or immediate actions.
3. The move towards business models that pool audiences (aka people) and thus help to “de-fragment” (I know, that’s not a pretty word :-)) the rapidly growing tail.
4. The increased (and very necessary!) focus on ad relevance in the non-search world.
5. The advent of more balanced overall usability for users – incorporating (hopefully) a deeper and better symbiosis of content and advertising.
6. The drive to enable tens and hundreds of thousands of advertisers to participate in all online advertising formats, not just search and contextual.

Here’s an example slide:

The full deck can be found here. There are undoubtedly other important trends and players. Would love to get your thoughts.

We think a few key aspects of the plugin architecture are especially worth noting:

• First, the plugin architecture extends most aspects of the ad server from the targeting engine to the delivery engine to the administrative user interface. This extensibility and flexibility empowers a broad range of innovation that allows you to customize the ad server and streamline your workflow.
• Second, plugins are outside the core application, which allows you to (1) upgrade a particular plugin without needing to upgrade the core or (2) upgrade (or patch) the core code without overwriting modifications made via plugins. Within the ad server, you can automatically check for new updates to a plugin and upgrade it with two clicks. No messy installations!
• Third, unlike changes to the core code that are required to be contributed back as open source to the community by our GPL license, commercial proprietary plugins are not required to be contributed back. Many developers have nontheless already begun to contribute open source plugins.
• Fourth, we’re providing the OpenX Developer Toolbox (Beta) for those who want to get started developing their own plugins. If you’d like to download the latest version, please click here.

There are many plugin efforts already underway. Next month, we are planning to launch a video ad plugin based on IAB’s VAST workflow and compatible with several leading video players. This exciting addition to the ad server will fully utilize the plugin architecture to extend the product in a completely new direction. Many more plugins are also being planned or are already underway and we believe this powerful system will allow our users to take their advertising efforts to the next level. Stay tuned!

I spent some time on our IRC chatroom discussing the release of the new downloadable version of OpenX Ad Server (OpenX Download 2.8). It was great to hear from the developers about how the new UI is being received and which additional features they’d like us to consider.

The best way for OpenX to continue building ad products that publishers love is to get continuous, constructive feedback from the community, and to incorporate it into our future product roadmap.

OpenX Download 2.8 has been out in the wild for a few days now and we’re eager to hear what you think: 

1. What new features of v2.8 do you find really useful?
2. How has OpenX Ad Server made an impact on your business?
3. What are the additional features you’d like to see in future versions?
4. What else can we provide to make OpenX more useful to you as you build your online business?
5. Are you using the API or plugin framework to do something interesting?

We will not only use this information for future product roadmaps, but also to build case studies about how folks use OpenX to optimize their ad serving.

Please either leave your feedback in the comments, or contact us. Your feedback is truly appreciated!