Most website owners, when they're ready to try to extract some money from their sites, turn to a single source such as Google AdSense or one of its competitors. But if you're a site owner, there's a more flexible alternative that's worth a look. Better yet, it's open source from end to end: OpenX.
What OpenX gives you is the ability to manage a mix of ads across your web site. If you've ever dealt with ads on the web (as a publisher) you know that the most lucrative ones are usually those that you sell directly, and that match your audience precisely. But often you won't have enough inventory of such ads to fill all your available space. In that case, you might want to mix in ads from an affiliate network or something like AdSense.
OpenX can manage all of that. You can set up multiple ad campaigns, specify the ads that they contain, and control things like their frequency of display. You can track clicks and monitor performance with its reporting tools.
You can serve all sorts of media, target ads by geography, and serve ads to multiple sites from a single OpenX server. To install your OpenX server, you need to have PHP running and some rudimentary configuration skills. After installation, everything is managed from a web interface.
OpenX is released under GPL. The company behind it (OpenX Limited) offers commercial support for those who feel that they need it, but that doesn't limit your ability to use and customize the software. The company has also recently seen a big change in management, with a new CEO from Yahoo! taking the helm.
Are you familiar with OpenX?Â
Comments
Add CommentBy wmcjak on Apr. 16, 2008
Am willing to try it, but do they have advertisers on their network? Do I need to do that myself? Are they only management or do they offer you advertisers too?
By Erik on Apr. 17, 2008
OpenX is not an ad network, and as such it does not have any advertisers pre-set for you. OpenX is an ad server, a piece of software not to different form a content management system. You can download it for free, install it on your server and use it to manage the ads on your site(s). You can use it to serve ads from networks, affiliate schemes, and so on. This includes Google AdSense. The nice thing is that once you've place the so-called Invocation Code that the OpenX software generates from you in the spots where you want ads to appear on your site, then you can manage the ads and campaigns completely web-based in OpenX without having to go into your site and make changes each time you need to add or remove a campaign. Saves you so much time!
By Mircea on Jul. 05, 2008
You can see a full review and installation tutorial of OpenX (including video) here: http://www.mytestbox.com/miscellaneous/openx-open-source-ad-server-softw...
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