OpenX has today launched its much anticipated hosted ad serving solution. OpenX Hosted is free to publishers serving up to 25 million ad impressions each month and professional and enterprise packages are available for larger publishers who need the additional services and support to manage their businesses.
OpenX Hosted version has been in beta testing since January 2008 and contains exactly the same software found in the original OpenX Ad Server. The new product allows publishers to use the software to operate all aspects of ad serving while OpenX provides all the hardware and back-end infrastructure, leaving publishers free to focus on their advertising revenues.
OpenX Hosted’s feature-set enables publishers to manage their advertising campaigns across multiple direct advertisers and ad networks, prioritize and optimize their campaigns, and use sophisticated targeting tools. Importantly, OpenX Hosted also enables publishers to maintain tight control over which advertisers are permitted to see their data and advertise to their users.
As you can see from the home page of the hosted version, there are some improvements. This home page aims to provide users with some very basic stats to make sure they aren’t going to go over the limit, as well as the community stats and news.
A few changes have also happened over at the Inventory page, in which seems to be a lot simplier in terms of design as well as some great graphics.
Overall
Overall the new OpenX hosted version is great for web publishers to control their own inventory. The limit of 25 million ad impressions per month is great for publishers, and allows OpenX to have a nice additional revenue stream. However, what I haven’t mentioned already is that OpenX are in Alpha of a new Ad Marketplace, in which I’m sure will be their main revenue stream in the near future.
For a while now I have been running Adphilia and we are only a small site representation company that is slowly growing. We have spent a lot of time trying to source the right Advertising server to meet our needs, but we still haven’t been able to find the right one in my mind. We have toyed with using free ad servers like OpenX or Google, as well as corporate ad servers like Right Media or Doubleclick. This is a post which just outlines what we have found within the company.
Free Ad Servers:
Open X – OpenX is an amazing piece of software that allows medium and large website to control their inventory. It is cost effective because the software is free, however you need to think about the implications advertising will have on your hosting servers, because huge amounts of ad serving can mean very large bandwidth costs. I also find OpenX a little hard to understand when you are first using the serving, plus I’m sure the larger your sites are the more complicated it becomes.
Google Ad Manager – Google Ad manager is a great product but it is built specifically for small publishers. It has a great design and easy to use. The first issue is that you can only use this ad server for small sites, because it is not compatible with any larger ad servers, and you have to put ad code straight into the header of your site. Additionally, I really don’t like the fact that when you deliver your first campaign you have to set it all up the day before it is allowed to be start. Small but bloody annoying.
Corporate Ad Servers:
Zedo – Zedo is very professional company with some great customer service. However, with them we got caught on the first hurdle, cause they were very expensive compared to all the other companies. Possibly, this is due to the great customer service and the results they can bring your sites. However, if you don’t have a great sales team to match what they can offer, there isnt too much point.
DoubleClick – This company just amazes me. Doubleclick seems to be a mish mash of several individual sections of software that has been mashed into one tool. Instead of Trafficking, reporting, billing and account details all in one sections, they seem to have segmented them, thus making it very untidy. However, they are the worlds best ad serving tool and the most used.
Atlas – Atlas, I tried to contact 5 times and they have never even responded to the messages I left. So I didn’t even get past the pricing stage let alone using their service. Typical Microsoft!
After all of these experiments it didn’t really bring me to finding the ad server solution that I was after. Im wanting a piece of software that is easy to understand and us, which doesn’t cost the earth, preferably free and web based. Does anyone know of a solution that I should try?
Over the last few months the market of ad serving has really heated up. Firstly, it was the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google, which was really supposed to accelerate Google into the display advertising market. While at the same time Open X announced funding, basically so they could turn their ad server from self hosted to hosted and controlled by Open X. Then comes the very recent announcement that Google is launching Ad Manager. Finally, this week it was announced that Yahoo are entering this competitive market and are soon to launch Yahoo AMP!.
The overall fight seems to be about control and more importantly information. Google has always been a company that is hungry for knowledge and information, but it seems that everyone wants to know all about advertising, be it long tail or short. Each option has its own unique selling point, DoubleClick is for huge volume clients, Google’s Ad Manager is just simple to use (especially if they have Google Adsense as defaults), Open X has a great free service for self hosted companies and with the inclusion of a hosted option im sure they will see even more interest, then finally there is Yahoo and AMP!, this service has had amazing early reviews and im very keen to get my hands on it.
Thus, who will win this race? Well, it has always been hard to look away from Google, but I do think that Yahoo might be on to something here. Yahoo has a very strong display advertising business already, and if they make a Ad Manager that ties in hundreds of other ad networks and offers great transparency, then im sure they will be in the box seat.
