OpenX Blog

Have you been looking for an easier way to earn even higher revenue from your ad space? We want to help you, so we’ve produced a video tutorial of OpenX Market to show you how to achieve this goal. OpenX Market is a new monetization service that provides you with a powerful way to expand your reach to advertisers who’d like to bid directly for your ad impressions. This means more advertisers will get to compete for your ad space, which translates into higher revenues for you, the publisher.

OpenX Market is seamlessly integrated with OpenX Ad Server (both the hosted and the downloadable versions), which means that getting started takes only a few clicks. And it also lets you set a floor price for each campaign’s ads, so OpenX Market will only serve ads if it can beat your specified price.  Maximizing your ad revenue is as easy as that!

Check out the OpenX Market video and start earning more today.

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!

One of the key features that we provide with the OpenX Ad Server is a free GeoIP plugin that can target ads based on a visitor’s country information. For even more precise targeting, such as at the city, postal code or area code level, users can purchase an upgraded GeoIP database package from MaxMind or other vendors.

Now Digital Element, a business unit of Digital Envoy, has developed plugins for OpenX 2.4, 2.6 and the soon-to-be-released 2.8, making it easier than ever before to integrate their industry-leading NetAcuity IP Intelligence technology for improved ad targeting accuracy. NetAcuity allows publishers and ad networks to serve ads based on a comprehensive set of parameters, including country, region/state, DMA, city, US area code, US/Canada postal code, connection speed, and internet service provider.

And through a special arrangement with Digital Element, OpenX users receive discounted pricing when they sign up for the NetAcuity plugin.

For more information about the NetAcuity Technology and the OpenX plugin, please visit Digital Element’s website.

We’re excited to begin a new series of OpenX Customer Spotlights! And to kick off the series we’re especially excited to spotlight FamilyLink.com, a company that provides innovative tools to connect families. Of special note is FamilyLink.com’s We’re Related product, which allows individuals to find relatives on Facebook, connect with family members, build family trees, and share news and photos. It’s actually a top-five application on Facebook and it is the number one family application!

FamilyLink.com has been an OpenX customer since 2008 when they downloaded our open source software. In late January 2009, they shifted to the Enterprise version of OpenX Hosted. As part of the migration to Enterprise Hosted, FamilyLink.com also selected one of our support packages that will enable them to work with the OpenX Support Team for any and all questions related to their OpenX implementation. So, in very short order, FamilyLink.com fulfilled all of their ad serving needs!

According to Jonathan Carroll, FamilyLink.com’s ad operations manager, “we originally selected OpenX for our ad serving because we were looking for a platform that provided the means for us to hyper-target our audience, guaranteed server up time and provided accounts for the advertisers and publishers on our AdMazing network to log in to and review up-to-date statistics. Switching to Hosted has been truly liberating since our advertising is now completely hosted on OpenX’s infrastructure, allowing us to focus exclusively on our relationships with our publishers, advertisers and the millions of folks who rely on FamilyLink.com to connect with their family members. In addition to the comprehensive ad serving platform and functionality we’ve come to expect from OpenX, the service and support that their team provides is timely, responsive and, not least, friendly!”

If you’d like to join FamilyLink.com and experience all of the benefits that OpenX Enterprise Hosted customers enjoy, please click here.

And, if you’re interested in having your website featured in an upcoming OpenX Customer Spotlight, please let us know.

I am going to be in Amsterdam on Thursday, March 26 with Erik Geurts, and we are hoping to spend time with members of the OpenX community who are nearby. Read more about it here:

• Erik’s Blog
• Facebook
• Upcoming.org
• LinkedIn

Please come if you are in the area. I look forward to seeing you there!

Last week, we released the public beta for Advertising Manager for Wordpress. It is a new application which allows Wordpress users to easily manage their ads inside the Wordpress admin console, without the need for consistently modifying HTML, or managing a separate application, when you need to change your ads.

The Advertising Manager for Wordpress project page has documentation and more information.

Feature suggestions, bug, and other feedback can be written in the Wordpress forums.

Download it now!

Now that we have released 2.7 beta, it is time to kick our translations efforts into high gear. In the past month, we have completed 6 new languages. In the next week, I am hoping that we can complete all the languages that are more than 50% complete:

• Danish
• Dutch
• Italian
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian

As you may have heard, there is a lot riding on this - we are giving away Official OpenX Translator T-shirts, some blog love, and other goodies (perhaps, to a lucky winner, The Amazing OpenX!)

The OpenX community is truly international, and we really want our product to reflect our global status.

So - get to work!

As you probably know, we’ve recently built a number of major new features into the OpenX Ad Server and we’re excited to let you know that they are now available in the OpenX 2.7 Beta release.

Here’s what you’ll get with this new release:

• Plugin Framework — With plugins, you can easily extend OpenX functionality in a variety of different areas. A number of plugins are already under development by OpenX as well as various community members.

• OpenX Market — Through the new OpenX Market plugin, which is included in this release, you will be able to participate in OpenX Market seamlessly within the Ad Server. OpenX Market enables you to maximize your ad revenue by letting advertisers bid competitively to show their ads on your site.

• UI Improvements — We’ve updated the user interface to improve the workflow and look-and-feel of the product. Check out the new navigation menus and easier to use inventory management screens.

• Improved Scalability — Thanks to a new and improved data logging architecture, you will be able to more easily scale your ad server.

As you get started using OpenX 2.7 Beta, please send us your feedback to help us as we develop our stable OpenX 2.8 version. Stay tuned for more exciting news coming soon…

Are you new to the world of online advertising? Interested in learning more about the basics of ad serving and everything that OpenX has to offer? If so, then check out our new Getting Started with OpenX video tutorial. This five-minute tutorial takes you on a screen-by-screen tour of the OpenX ad server and shows how you can get started with serving your first ads. It’s a great way to quickly get up to speed with the basics of OpenX, so that you can move on to utilizing even more of OpenX’s powerful and customizable ad serving technology.  This translates into earning more and more revenue from your online advertising. Why wait?

To serve our vast and growing community of more than 150,000 websites across the web, we’re continually working on additional help resources, including video tutorials like this one. Pretty soon, we’ll be publishing video tutorials on topics like getting started with OpenX Market, using the plugin framework and more. If you have suggestions for video tutorial subjects, please contact us with your ideas!

One of my pet projects over the last few weeks has been to build a simple advertising management platform for Wordpress. OpenX has dabbled in this arena before, and has built a plug-in which will easily integrate with OpenX Hosted or Downloaded versions.

However, most users of Wordpress do not need a full featured ad server for their blog. So, we decided to build an entirely separate plug-in which serves ads on its own. We have worked with Mutube, the writer of the very excellent Adsense Manager plug-in, to provide the base to our Wordpress plug-in. The plug-in has the following features:

• Automatic detection of over 10 3rd party ad networks and adservers, including Adsense, CJ, OpenX and others
• Simple UI which integrates completely in Wordpress
• Support for older versions of Wordpress, as well as the newest release, v2.7
• Ability to rotate multiple ads in ad zones
• Ability to optimise your ad networks by modifying the weight (% of time they show), and ability to allow ad networks to compete with the OpenX Market for the highest eCPM
• Easily place ads within blog posts, or in your WP templates
• Many more features which make this an incredibly useful tool for your blog!

Advertising Manager for Wordpress is currently being beta tested by a few trusted folks. We are looking for a few others who would be willing to test the plug-in, and give feedback. Hopefully, we can then release Advertising Manager for Wordpress Beta very shortly.

Please PM me or respond in the comments if you are willing to help!

Advertising Manager in Wordpress v2.6

A list screen in Advertising Manager using Wordpress 2.7

An edit screen of Advertising Manager in Wordpress 2.7