At the moment I just hand code some php to do simple rotating banners. But I’d like to get to the point where I can take things up a notch and be able to look at revenue per impression rather than just revenue per unique click. Thing is, it’s not revenue per banner impression, there’s also blog post impression, etc.
I’ve seen some of you mention OpenX, but it seems that’s a hosted solution now. The open source version isn’t being upgraded to the latest version. The hosted version is pretty pricey, there are some competitors, but I’m not sure they’re worth the expense either. I see some of them talking about crawling the pages to learn about the content and serve appropriate ads, but some of my forum pages are restricted members-only pages a bot may not be able to see.
I could have something custom written for me, but it’s going to be a lot of data - I’m at 2 million page views a month - times 2 or 3 banner ads per page - it’ll add up over time.
Thoughts? What works well? Can what you use analyze revenue per impression?
I have a professional background in online advertising and I don’t see any problem in using a self hosted version of OpenX. The free hosted version lets you have 100 Million impressions per month. That’s a lot.
I am using SmartSpots. Never had a problem with it at all. Servers all my banners on my tubes and mgps. both str8,shemale and gay. No downtime for two years
[QUOTE=rawTOP;113636]At the moment I just hand code some php to do simple rotating banners. But I’d like to get to the point where I can take things up a notch and be able to look at revenue per impression rather than just revenue per unique click. Thing is, it’s not revenue per banner impression, there’s also blog post impression, etc.
I’ve seen some of you mention OpenX, but it seems that’s a hosted solution now. The open source version isn’t being upgraded to the latest version. The hosted version is pretty pricey, there are some competitors, but I’m not sure they’re worth the expense either. I see some of them talking about crawling the pages to learn about the content and serve appropriate ads, but some of my forum pages are restricted members-only pages a bot may not be able to see.
I could have something custom written for me, but it’s going to be a lot of data - I’m at 2 million page views a month - times 2 or 3 banner ads per page - it’ll add up over time.
Thoughts? What works well? Can what you use analyze revenue per impression?[/QUOTE]
I’ve used OpenX for years but as you mentioned not sure they upgraded it any more. They’ve not really said what will happen in the future or if they really have stopped working on it. But I’m guessing they stopped entirely as there hasn’t been any updates for a long time. I’ve also had problems with every single upgrade they did during the last year or two when they did publish upgrades. Massive problems. Apart from that it’s a good script but I really wouldn’t pay for it. Their support is lacking a lot and always been very flaky. Each upgrade or release creates a new problem, never any response or much interaction from their part. So no… I wouldn’t trust their hosted solution.
Like you I’m also looking for something new to use. I don’t even need anything that sophisticated, just want something that actually works and is efficient on server resources due to the scale of banner impressions.
[QUOTE=gaydemon;113645]I’ve used OpenX for years but as you mentioned not sure they upgraded it any more. They’ve not really said what will happen in the future or if they really have stopped working on it. But I’m guessing they stopped entirely as there hasn’t been any updates for a long time. I’ve also had problems with every single upgrade they did during the last year or two when they did publish upgrades. Massive problems. Apart from that it’s a good script but I really wouldn’t pay for it. Their support is lacking a lot and always been very flaky. Each upgrade or release creates a new problem, never any response or much interaction from their part. So no… I wouldn’t trust their hosted solution.
Like you I’m also looking for something new to use. I don’t even need anything that sophisticated, just want something that actually works and is efficient on server resources due to the scale of banner impressions.[/QUOTE]
I forget where I saw it, but basically they said updates to OpenX Souce stopped when OpenX Enterprise was released - apparently that was some time in 2010.
OpenX Enterprise is pretty expensive - $1200/month for up to 50 million ad impressions. (And the price could have gone up since the blog post I linked to was written). There’s gotta be value in whatever I choose. If I went with OpenX, I’d want to know how it will make me an additional $1200+/month since my current kludgey solution costs me nothing. I don’t need things like the ability for sponsors to do ad buys, which seems to be the big selling point of a lot of the ad serving solutions. But I would like to step up to contextual ads. I’d like the ability to do $$/impression and include things like blog post impression, etc.
There seem to be a lot of options out there that are considerably less than $1200/mo. Since I don’t need the ability for sponsors to do ad buys, I’d like something that is a one time charge. I don’t have time to run down all the options I’ve found - maybe later…
[QUOTE=rawTOP;113658]I forget where I saw it, but basically they said updates to OpenX Souce stopped when OpenX Enterprise was released - apparently that was some time in 2010.
OpenX Enterprise is pretty expensive - $1200/month for up to 50 million ad impressions. (And the price could have gone up since the blog post I linked to was written). There’s gotta be value in whatever I choose. If I went with OpenX, I’d want to know how it will make me an additional $1200+/month since my current kludgey solution costs me nothing. I don’t need things like the ability for sponsors to do ad buys, which seems to be the big selling point of a lot of the ad serving solutions. But I would like to step up to contextual ads. I’d like the ability to do $$/impression and include things like blog post impression, etc.
There seem to be a lot of options out there that are considerably less than $1200/mo. Since I don’t need the ability for sponsors to do ad buys, I’d like something that is a one time charge. I don’t have time to run down all the options I’ve found - maybe later…[/QUOTE]
If I went with Open X Enterprise the cost means I would be under much greater pressure to make those adverts sell than if I host them on my own. $1200 is a lot of sales, specially on banner traffic. The price they are charging is very excessive! It’s cheaper for me to have my own dedicated server that just hosts adverts than using their service, plus it would probably perform better than theirs (you probably share their servers with other clients).
I would be interested in hearing about other solutions (cheaper). Self hosted is my own preference.
I use OpenX and it’s quite a pain to get working but there was an update just a few months back. Nearly killed everything but it eventually worked. The only major issue I have is getting around Adblock with it, I symlinked multiple directories and files to avoid it. If there’s something better I would definitely jump for it but it does work.
If you downloaded it, then it’s OpenX Source - the others are a hosted solution that cost big $$. “Source” isn’t getting new features like Enterprise is…
I’ve not had any issues with OpenX source but stats do seem to break with PHP 5.4 (almost no one but me is going to be on 5.4). Not that I ever really relied on them, if I really wanted since all the ad links go through jumpscript I could track it there though the only reason to do that is not trusting sponsor stats. But it basically just works and considering it’s free that’s enough, saves me the trouble of writing my own stuff.
[QUOTE=rob;113679]What features do you want that OpenX Source doesn’t have?
It works just fine.[/QUOTE]
It does work ok, but there are still bugs in the script. For example I have to manually clear out mySQL tables every month otherwise they become too large and the server slows down. It should do it automatically but it doesn’t. Something wrong where the tables just get bigger and bigger.
RawTop’s concerns are very valid. Problem isn’t functionality but that most of the bug fixes they released were security fixes. They kept finding ways of exploiting the script and was forever patching it up. What will happen now when someone finds and exploits a security hole / backdoor?
I just moved this past week. The question was more of a “before I forget to ask…” sorta deal. Construction on the house is wrapping up, so I’ll gradually get back to business in the next few weeks (after months of neglecting my sites)…
So short answer - no, I haven’t found or tested anything.
Oh Boy that construction project has sure been a long one for you…
[QUOTE=rawTOP;115022]I just moved this past week. The question was more of a “before I forget to ask…” sorta deal. Construction on the house is wrapping up, so I’ll gradually get back to business in the next few weeks (after months of neglecting my sites)…
So short answer - no, I haven’t found or tested anything.[/QUOTE]
