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OpenX is an open source ad serving platform and advertising marketplace that helps publishers manage and optimize their advertising networks, as well as sell their advertising space to advertisers via the OpenX Market. With a growing user base of 50,000 publishers, OpenX may help Microsoft grow their contextual ad serving business. Fully story on Reuters [reuters.com].
[edited by: martinibuster at 7:44 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2009]
I use OpenX and it's a fantastic tool for managing ads from multiple networks and channels, much more product depth than Google's Ad Manager.
Especially well suited for sites like mine that sell direct advertising as well as using ad networks.
Here's a link to the story on Reuters.
[reuters.com...]
[added] I see MB has taken out the link to the WSJ in the OP and replaced it with a link to Reuters[/added]
[edited by: ken_b at 8:18 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2009]
...much more product depth than Google's Ad Manager.
Another benefit of OpenX over Google's Ad Manager is that you can reclaim your privacy by hosting OpenX yourself instead of making the usual devil's pact with Google of sacrificing your data.
benefit of OpenX over Google's Ad Manager is that you can reclaim your privacy by hostingThis is one of important reason we still do not prefer using Ad Manager from Google.
Google tends to win because they can serve things quickly. OpenX has always seemed a bit slow to me. I run my own ad server cutting out the 10,000 lines (my estimate and I've not counted them) of code that aren't much use for what I'm doing.
Though this is coming from someone who doesn't like to serve pages over 10kb. The slow wouldn't be noticed by those serving 200kb pages with 300kb of Javascript which seems the norm these days.
EDIT> I made my point very badly - I think it's a super idea.
[edited by: vordmeister at 8:07 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2009]
How are they addressing that problem ?
The "devil's pact with Google of sacrificing your data" I'd be *far* more concerned about such a pact with MSFT than with GOOG. If you already think GOOG is the devil, I'm a bit at a loss for a metaphor worse enough to describe MSFT.
OpenX is also an advertising marketplace [openx.org]. Nobody's claiming this will bring them up to Google's level, however this is a move toward actually competing.
[edited by: martinibuster at 8:17 pm (utc) on Nov. 2, 2009]
But competition is good for any market. And this should help OpenX stick around for many more years to come... which is great since they have a good product.
Side note: I wonder how many inbound links the WSJ loses to the fact that they require registration to read their articles? ;-)
- Offer better ad revenue sharing margins. Google does not disclose how much they share with small publishers. I don't know if it is true, but once I read that it is 51% of 100% - 15%, where 15% is an ad serving fee. In that case it gives 43%, which is less than most ad agencies pay.
- Newsletter ad placements. Many of us have newsletters with vacant ad spaces, but Google does not offer placement of ads in newsletters.
These are just a couple of ideas that Microsoft can offer more than Google is offering to the publishers.
I'll have to read the full details of this, but it sounds very promising. OpenX is some pretty good stuff, and an infusion of capital (there' had to be some money involved right?) can only do good things. And I'm looking to expand a niche ad marketplace, this has some interesting connotations for me. Happy news!
The company itself is badly run, with customer support being one of the worst of any company you might find, and they took a product that worked really well, and with each release have made it buggier, and more resource intensive.
Their hosted service is a disaster, and cost webmasters countless piles of money due to long outages not serving ads, not serving the right ads.
To add to this their open market service is a bottom feeder program, paying virtually nothing. Since the open market service is their method of monetizing, the business model is/was flawed anyway. Perhaps MS can change that.
So, if you put aside the hype and Cadogan's stellar ability to create buzz and market, (instead of putting resources to fix their products), they have a long way to go.
Competition for google? There's no indication they belong in the same league.
With any luck they'll let us pull MS ads through our own hosted copy of openx. Then no more using adwords for backfill - not that I use adwords for backfill right now. Their payouts are so low (and I'm in a high paying niche) that my publishers just let me run 'advertise here' blanks when we've got unsold inventory.
The company itself is badly run, with customer support being one of the worst of any company you might find, and they took a product that worked really well, and with each release have made it buggier, and more resource intensive.Their hosted service is a disaster, and cost webmasters countless piles of money due to long outages not serving ads, not serving the right ads.
You've almost described AdSense down to the letter, buggier each release, bad support, off topic ads, etc.
They're definitely in the same league :)
Hey, YPN! couldn't pull it off so let's just see what Microsoft can do here because at a minimum MS can provide superior engineering talent to clean up buggy software.
I count the following, though I'm sure I've missed one.
phpads
phpadsnew
openads
openX
that's some superb PR right there. Doh!
phpads
phpadsnew
openads
openXthat's some superb PR right there. Doh!
It must be, since you rememberd nearly all of them all :)
Each re-name led to a bit of online coverage, worked out ok for them.
I think the one you missed was "Max media manager", although this was more of a branch off from the origional project. It was for ad agencies.
Mack.
You've almost described AdSense down to the letter, buggier each release, bad support, off topic ads, etc.They're definitely in the same league :)
They aren't even in the same sport! Let's be clear when we compare since openx is an ad serving solution, which adsense is not.
Since openx is not contextual its ability to target your websites (if you think it will replace adsense) is zero. There are ways to set things up to make it semi-contextual and use page keywords, but it's not even close to adsense.
Anyway, my bet is that if you take a lousy platform that is buggy and limited, and glue it on to something by Microsoft, as a publisher you are just going to get headaches for pennies.
I'm trying to imagine the kludged concotion to get openx to serve contextual ads from MS. Yikes.
Look, I want choice to, and I use openx to serve my ads, but it's a bottom scraper re: ads, and right now it's really only meant as a supplier to fill remnant inventory. And in a non-targeted way. Right now, at .10 or below CPM, I don't want ads on my site.
The more I think about it, the more strange this marriage is. I don't see much synergy here.
Wake me up when they have some sort of international offering.
Set up a Cloud hosting account... cheap and scalable.
Mack.
coachm, the title is misleading, it should say "to compete with google ad manager". the synergy is the ability to offer backfilling with microsoft contextual ads within openx, just like how google ad manager uses adsense to backfill.
But, you can already use any ad network you want in openx (and admanager, for that matter). I'm trying to understand how this adds functionality to users.
The more complex the system and the more parties involved, the more likely it will fail often, or be inconsistent.
If there is an advantage to MS in terms of getting a "ready made" publisher network, I can pretty much guarantee that the quality of the existing network is not going to be very good. MS must have better ways to go if it has too many advertisers and not enough publishers (honestly, does anybody believe that's the "problem"?
OpenX is PHP. It uses PHP scripts to cache database accesses. All you needed to do is to use a PHP caching extension.
Most shared hosting companies do not have PHP caching extensions because they have no clue what they are doing.
They just install a random Linux distribution that comes with severely unoptimized PHP binaries that rely a lot on shared libraries. Just that fact makes PHP run 30% slower.
It is not sufficient to buy a good car. You also have to take driver lessons.
The solution is to get at least a VPS and compile PHP and a caching extension manually.
[edited by: tedster at 8:06 pm (utc) on Nov. 5, 2009]
Most shared hosting companies will not tune things if you ask them because you are paying low fees. You get what you pay for.
You can perform some tuning of OpenX on shared hosting adjusting its configuration to avoid hitting the database so much.
Still ad serving is not a light task and shared hosting is not the right option for that purpose once you start getting good traffic.
As for your claim of those that afford VPS not using Open Source, that is totally ridiculous.
PHP is Open Source and totally dominates the Web. To not go any further, Facebook runs on PHP and they have whole data centers full of dedicated servers running PHP. They use PHP because PHP works well, as it was thought for Web applications since 15 years ago.
Of course they use tuned servers because they know how to do it and since they run dedicated servers they can configure the way they want them.
Your problem is that you cannot afford more than shared hosting and your hosting company will not let you tune the server for ad serving or other heavy tasks.
In that case, hiring an hosted solution as of OpenX or Google AdManager may be more suitable for you if you already have a reasonable ad serving volume.
I can understand that, but then they're limiting their market. Not everyone can afford a VPS. And the ones that do, really don't need to rely on open-source software. Beyond that, for any software to be such a resource hog is absurd.
There have been reported problems with cpu load, etc, but I tend to think many are a result of running openx on under-powered shared hosting for cheap.
Some hosts have trouble supporting even plain bulletin board mysql systems when there are more than 10 users online because they oversell, knowing almost everyone will underuse. THey then turf the higher resource users.
That said, don't plan on things changing. Openx is clearly unable to manage their technology and software, and it's most likely bad management. They are struggling to add new features, do not test properly, and end up going backwards in terms of bugs and useability.
On the technical and support side, it's a house of cards.
