This week we will introduce OpenX 2.8.2, the latest version of the OpenX Ad Server. We will first launch the new version on OpenX Hosted on Tuesday (update: see 2.8.2 upgrade schedule). We’ll then make it available for download a few days after. It will include a number of improvements to the delivery of contract campaigns, as well as various security updates and bug fixes. You can expect the following enhancements with the new OpenX 2.8.2 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.
Based on the enthusiastic response of OpenX publishers to its recent search engine optimization webinar, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is making a new offer to our publishers. The IAB is opening up its next four Long Tail Alliance webinars to OpenX publishers for free.
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!
We’d like to inform you of a special offer that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is making to OpenX publishers. The IAB regularly arranges educational webinars for members of their Long Tail Alliance members on topics relevant to medium and small publishers. They’ve opened up their next webinar - Search Engine Optimization - to OpenX publishers for free.
The webinar will be presented by Google search evangelist Adam Lasnik and is designed to help you make your site’s content more accessible for users and Google, and also gain insight into their comprehensive resources for webmasters. The webinar will be held on September 11th from 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm Eastern Time.
To take part in this, please visit www.iab.net/longtail_webinars. Although there is no charge for you to attend, you do need to register in advance.
Enjoy the webinar and be on the lookout for more great offers from OpenX and the IAB soon!
Are you a Facebook App developer? Starting today, you can manage the ads within your Facebook Apps with OpenX Hosted. Now, when you get the ad tag for a zone (on the zone’s Invocation Code tab), you will see a new type of invocation called “Facebook App Tag”. If you select this tag type, you will be given the tags necessary to make your ads appear in your Facebook Apps.
You can also target your Facebook App ads according to Age Group, Educational Attainment, Gender, and Relationship Status. All you need to do is go to your banner’s Delivery Options tab, select the desired demographic targeting criteria, and then choose which values you wish to target.
Of course, you’ll be able to use OpenX Hosted to manage the campaigns and reports for your Facebook App ads just like you would for any other type of ad. For more info on managing your Facebook App ads, click here.
Since announcing OpenX Market in April, we’ve been closely monitoring how well Market publishers have been monetizing their ad space. The early numbers have shown some very positive gains. Based on the data we’ve seen so far, the average revenue (on a CPM basis) from ads served by OpenX Market is 25% greater than the average floor price specified by publishers.
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):
Start earning more from your ad space today by selling on OpenX Market!
Prioritizing campaigns is a great way to earn higher ad revenue from your websites’ ads. By giving higher priority to better performing campaigns, you’ll deliver a greater number of ads that are higher paying. This leads to more revenue for you.
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.
We’re pleased to announce that OpenX 2.8.1 is now available for download. Along with making a number of UI and backend improvements in this release, we are also introducing some enhancements to the OpenX Market plugin.
- 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.
Hi there - as I am sure many people already saw, we just raised an additional $10.4m in our third round of funding. For those who are interested, here a few examples of the media coverage: The Times of London, Financial Times, The New York Times, MarketWatch, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MediaPost, and paidContent.org.
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
As John mentioned in his post a couple of weeks ago, one of the major changes in v2.8 is the introduction of a new plugin framework. This framework allows developers to customize many aspects of the ad server functionality.
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!
Earlier today, we were excited to formally announce the launch of OpenX Market. If you’re a publisher, the good news is that with OpenX Market you now have the means to reach a broader set of buyers who see a lot of value in your audience but would otherwise have a difficult time discovering your ad space. It’s all about making these connections much more simple and scalable.
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:
Take a look and get started with maximizing your revenue through OpenX Market today!
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