.Seeking Recommendations on New Ad Server
Since March 2004, we have used the amazing open-source workhorse phpAdsNew (now called OpenAds) to serve all 357,993,568 ad impressions on our sites. For three years, phpAdsNew has been extremely reliable and impressive. We have been very encouraged by their renewed code development and think their plan to follow in MySQL’s footsteps as a for-profit open source company will be very successful.
However, we’re about to outgrow phpAdsNew (if we haven’t already) and we’re looking for the ad server that will take us to 10 million impressions per day.
The first candidate is OpenAds2.3 (previously called MediaMaxManager) the two year old development branch of phpAdsNew that is far more robust. However, it’s not 100% stable, and has the same problem we currently have which is that the IT departments of our big advertisers and their agencies consistently blame any reporting inconsistency on the fact we use open source software.
If our top priority was reflecting our advertisers ad server then DoubleClick DART would be our choice. Every advertiser uses it, I believe because every advertiser uses it. To us, their software feels as if it has hardly been updated since 1998 and DoubleClick has a very bad reputation for significantly under-reporting impressions.
Others we’ll probably considering are Accipiter (recently acquired by Microsoft) and Mediaplex.
Does anyone have any suggestions, recommendations, reservations, critiques on these or others?
Who are we missing from our review list?
To be honest I would have thought that by 2007, enterprise ad serving software would be in far better state. I would have expected competitors with far better offerings to be have come to market.
All the more reason to expect OpenAds’ $5M investment and plans to become the MySql AB of enterprise ad serving to be that much more successful.
Ted -
Openads version 2.3 is in beta, and the community of testers have received it well. It will be in a public release very soon.
Openads has spent months reducing descrepencies between Doubleclick, Atlas, Falk, Adtech, and many other ad servers - it is probably the best in the industry with integration. Note that there are issues with all ad servers - even Doubleclick to Doubleclick descrepancies!
If you have any questions about the new version of Openads, please let me know. It sounds like you have had success so far with Openads, and I would love to see you continue!
Cheers,
Scott Switzer
Openads Community Leader
Thanks Scott.
I appreciate you checking in on this. I recognize your name and leadership role going back to some of my earliest postings on the forums in 2004. (This is me). Best success with the new OpenAds and the new company.
I’m glad to know you’ve been focused on reducing discrepancies. It’s a huge headache for us. Unfortunately we still have seen much change and are still over-serving 40% to meet to our impression requirements, which means less overall ad revenue.
We expect much of the problem lies with their use of Doubleclick, but our ad force spends a lot of time on tracking and tweaking live campaigns. A task we wish we could relieve them of.
I’m glad to hear you consider Openads2.3 in beta. There are slightly different statements throughtout the site and forums. For example in the download is still titled alpha and the readme.txt file states: “THIS IS ALPHA SOFTWARE AND MAY NOT BE STABLE ENOUGH FOR USE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE IS COMPLETELY AT YOUR OWN RISK!”
Thanks for the offer of help, I expect you’ll be hearing from us as we continue to test Oa2.3
I may have gotten ahead of myself regarding the alpha/beta of Openads 2.3. At the moment, we have on our site v2.3 ALPHA, and we are undergoing a private beta with 20-30 publishers. The site will be updated shortly with the BETA product for all to use.
Cheers,
Scott
Hi Ted,
You may be interested in our white label contextual adserving system for publishers called AdTarget. It’s a complete off the shelf contextual and search adserving system which looks similar to Google Adwords but is tailored for each publisher. AdTarget allows you to set your own advertising rates whether that is Tneancy, CPM or PPC per advertiser. Full, detailed reporting and training is given to you to allow you to sell your own text based ads profitably and quickly.
Happy to discuss further - just drop me an email.
Thanks
Alasdair
I think you’re right about DART DFP not changing in the last 9 years! Then again, I think few ad servers have truly advanced in that time.
Any open-sourced ad server will only be as good as the development team at your company supporting it. Don’t expect a free ride!
As for enterprise ad serving tools - here in the UK, the main drive has been towards outsourcing. In my opinion, this is because ad serving in a UK publisher structure would be a function of a sales team, and a sales director probably prefers the outsourced option, preferring a relationship with a supplier rather than an internal IT team. As such, enterprise-level ad servers have probably stalled a little.