Serving Ads with OpenX
by Mike Gunderloy - Apr. 15, 2008Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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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
