OpenX

New video tutorial: how to prioritize your campaigns in OpenX
Prioritizing campaigns is a great way to earn higher ad revenue from your websites’ ads. By giving higher priority to better performing campaigns, you’ll deliver a greater number of ads that are higher paying. This leads to more revenue for you. To help you get better acquainted wi...

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OpenX 2.8.1 is here: using OpenX Market is even easier
We’re pleased to announce that OpenX 2.8.1 is now available for download. Along with making a number of UI and backend improvements in this release, we are also introducing some enhancements to the OpenX Market plugin. OpenX Market Quickstart - With the OpenX Market Quickstart screen (...

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New financing: increasing our ability to provide ever better products and services to our community
Hi there - as I am sure many people already saw, we just raised an additional $10.4m in our third round of funding. For those who are interested, here a few examples of the media coverage: The Times of London, Financial Times, The New York Times, MarketWatch, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MediaPost, ...

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Plugin framework… exposed!
As John mentioned in his post a couple of weeks ago, one of the major changes in v2.8 is the introduction of a new plugin framework. This framework allows developers to customize many aspects of the ad server functionality. Wherever possible, we’re trying to build new features as plugins...

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A Renaissance in Online Advertising
When people were getting all creative in fourteenth century Italy, they didn’t think of themselves as driving a renaissance. That only became clearer later. I think something similar (on perhaps a less exalted level!) is happening in online advertising today. Last week I gave a talk at Web 2.0 in San Francisco about this. The theme was why - despite plenty of gloom about the advertising space – we’re actually in a period of great innovation that is going to really drive value over the next couple of years. I noted a couple of interesting trends, notably the current massive asymmetry in economic value creation between search vs. the rest. I proposed a few explanations for this. I also shared a perspective on some of the important, emerging themes (or solutions) that are going to help drive longer-term economic value and mentioned some of the companies that are working in these spaces. The key themes covered: The increasing importance of people > places. The drive to deepen understanding of people’s interests and intent, not just their context or immediate actions. The move towards business models that pool audiences (aka people) and thus help to “de-fragment” (I know, that’s not a pretty word :-)) the rapidly growing tail. The increased (and very necessary!) focus on ad relevance in the non-search world. The advent of more balanced overall usability for users – incorporating (hopefully) a deeper and better symbiosis of content and advertising. The drive to enable tens and hundreds of thousands of advertisers to participate in all online advertising formats, not just search and contextual. Here’s an example slide: The full deck can be found here. There are undoubtedly other important trends and players. Would love to get your thoughts.

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OpenX Ad Server 2.8 - Plugin Architecture
With the recent release of OpenX Ad Server 2.8, a very powerful addition to the product was added with the new plugin architecture. This new framework is a first for our industry: no other ad server offers an extensive plugin architecture. A plugin architecture provides hooks into many of the core engines to allow developers to write code (plugins) that extend or change the functionality of these engines such as targeting, banner types, or delivery. We believe it will really help accomplish our vision of making OpenX Ad Server the advertising foundation for any business serving ads on their web properties by powering innovation in a meaningful new way. To download OpenX Ad Server 2.8, please click here. We think a few key aspects of the plugin architecture are especially worth noting: First, the plugin architecture extends most aspects of the ad server from the targeting engine to the delivery engine to the administrative user interface. This extensibility and flexibility empowers a broad range of innovation that allows you to customize the ad server and streamline your workflow. Second, plugins are outside the core application, which allows you to (1) upgrade a particular plugin without needing to upgrade the core or (2) upgrade (or patch) the core code without overwriting modifications made via plugins. Within the ad server, you can automatically check for new updates to a plugin and upgrade it with two clicks. No messy installations! Third, unlike changes to the core code that are required to be contributed back as open source to the community by our GPL license, commercial proprietary plugins are not required to be contributed back. Many developers have nontheless already begun to contribute open source plugins. Fourth, we’re providing the OpenX Developer Toolbox (Beta) for those who want to get started developing their own plugins. If you’d like to download the latest version, please click here. There are many plugin efforts already underway. Next month, we are planning to launch a video ad plugin based on IAB’s VAST workflow and compatible with several leading video players. This exciting addition to the ad server will fully utilize the plugin architecture to extend the product in a completely new direction. Many more plugins are also being planned or are already underway and we believe this powerful system will allow our users to take their advertising efforts to the next level. Stay tuned!

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Scott Switzer, OpenX founder and community leader, and Erik Geurts, a leading OpenX consultant, will be in Amsterdam for an afternoon of questions and answers, road map discus...