Last month we sent out a survey to the OpenX publisher base on direct ad sales.  We wanted to gather as much data as we could on how publishers approach direct ad selling to distill some insights and best practices in this area.  After sifting through nearly 500 responses, we found some pretty interesting results on what works and what doesn’t work.  And we’re happy to share these results with you.

Download our study on Direct Ad Selling Practices.

We’re hopeful the study provides some helpful tips to your business.  And if you have feedback on direct ad selling practicies that have been particularly successful for you, feel free to let us know.

We’re pleased to let you know that the OpenX Video Plugin is now available! It has already been installed on the hosted OpenX ad server, now called OpenX Community Hosted. And if you are using the OpenX 2.8.2 download, now called OpenX Community Download, you can download the OpenX Video Plugin package here to install it on your own ad server. This plugin represents significant progress, both in terms of the types of ad formats you can manage through any OpenX ad server and in terms of the extensibility of OpenX as a foundation for your ad serving.

The OpenX Video Plugin enables you to traffic your own video ads through OpenX together with your flash media player and media provider. It follows the IAB VAST standard and supports inline video ads, i.e., pre/mid/post-roll ads, and overlay ads, i.e., image, swf, text or HTML ads that display on top of the main video stream. It also allows you to track statistics for VAST-specific events related to your video ads (pauses, mutes, quartile views, etc.). And for remnant campaigns, it provides the ability to serve one companion banner per video ad.

Since this is the first version of the OpenX Video Plugin, it is intended to serve your own video ads only and does not include the ability to integrate video ads coming from ad networks. We will be working to evolve the plugin to include more features like this in the next version.

Please be sure to read through the following documentation on getting started with the OpenX Video Plugin.

Relevant Documentation

• Introduction to the OpenX Video Plugin
• Step-by-step guide on serving your first ad with the OpenX Video Plugin
• Guide to statistics for video ads

Please note: Serving video ads also requires you to use a VAST plugin on your video player in order to schedule the ads for your player and translate the responses coming from the OpenX Video Plugin. If you use Flowplayer or JW Player as your video player, you can use the Open Ad Streamer Plugin from the Open Video Ads project for this purpose. If you use a custom flash media player, you can use the Open Video Ads VAST Actionscript 3 Framework to develop your own custom VAST compliant video player plugin.  Visit the Open Video Ads project to learn more about these options.

Check out the OpenX Video Plugin today and get started with serving video ads!

Hi there,

As you might have read, last week we were very pleased to announce an advertising technology partnership together with Microsoft.

Under this partnership OpenX and Microsoft will cross-market and promote products to our respective publisher bases. Specifically, Microsoft will refer publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions to OpenX and OpenX will promote Microsoft’s Content Ads service (which is a contextual advertising product) to OpenX publishers.

When we evaluated this partnership we thought, as we always do, about our core company goals. Those goals are very clear: to provide advertising technology that helps businesses grow online and help connect those businesses to revenue sources that help them make more money.

We feel this partnership really helps us make progress against those two goals.

First, it will help us enable more online businesses to grow by exposing our advertising technology to more potential customers via the referral arrangement with Microsoft.

Second, the Content Ads component of the partnership enables us to make another revenue option easily accessible to OpenX publishers. By integrating Content Ads into the OpenX Market, it will become another buyer competing for your inventory. We will also build a plugin for the ad server that will make it easy to sign up and use Content Ads. Of course this will totally be at your option.

We’re fired up about this partnership and are looking forward to making it very successful.

Please let us know your questions and thoughts.

Last week, we announced the upgrade of OpenX Hosted to OpenX 2.8.2, an improved version of OpenX Ad Server that features better performing ad delivery, security updates and various other enhancements (please see the blog post for more details). Now, we’ve made this version available for download, so you can host this version of the Ad Server yourself.

We’d also like to remind you of our preferred web host, DreamHost, which we recommend using to host OpenX 2.8.2. Sign up here and be sure to use the promo code “OpenX” to get $20 off your first year.

So check out OpenX 2.8.2 to take advantage of the new enhancements. And for more information, check out the release notes here. Let us know what you think by sending us your feedback on the release.

This week we will introduce OpenX 2.8.2, the latest version of the OpenX Ad Server. We will first launch the new version on OpenX Hosted on Tuesday (update: see 2.8.2 upgrade schedule).  We’ll then make it available for download a few days after. It will include a number of improvements to the delivery of contract campaigns, as well as various security updates and bug fixes. You can expect the following enhancements with the new OpenX 2.8.2 release.

• Improvements to ad delivery - With OpenX 2.8.2, we have made a number of changes to the delivery engine to ensure the proper allocation of ads across contract campaigns. The resulting improvements will reduce the occurrence of under-delivery and over-delivery for all contract campaigns.
• Improvements to campaigns using companion positioning - Prior to OpenX 2.8.2, once a “companion” campaign served one ad on a page, it prevented any other campaigns from serving ads on the page, regardless of whether the companion campaign could fill all of the page’s ads itself. In OpenX 2.8.2, we’ve fixed this behavior, so if there are ads on the page that the companion campaign is unable to serve, they will be offered to other campaigns (helping you avoid serving blanks).
• Security updates - We have completed a number of critical security updates to the ad server in OpenX 2.8.2 to reduce any potential vulnerabilities in the software.

In addition to these enhancements, we’ve made numerous additional performance improvements and bug fixes. Be sure to check out the release notes when they’re made available on Thursday.

If you are using OpenX Hosted, there’s more. In addition to upgrading the OpenX Hosted platform to OpenX 2.8.2 on Tuesday, we will be making further improvements throughout the next two weeks to significantly improve your experience on OpenX Hosted (update: see Market Plugin upgrade schedule).

• OpenX Market UI updates - This week, we’ll be updating how OpenX Hosted integrates with OpenX Market. You will be able to use tools like the OpenX Market Quickstart page and the Ad Quality Tool, which we previously launched for downloaded users (see this blog post). You will also be able to view details like your payment history.
• New and improved ad prioritization - Next week, we will be going live with a new process for prioritizing campaigns in OpenX Hosted. We’ve spent a number of months rewriting this process and have already rolled it out to some OpenX Enterprise Hosted clients with great success. With the new process in place, campaigns will deliver more accurately, the admin UI will be faster, and the system will prioritize contract campaigns in near real-time.
• New and improved reporting infrastructure - There will also be a number of updates to the way statistics are processed, making OpenX Hosted more in line with IAB requirements (we are in the final stages of certifying our Hosted platforms as IAB compliant). These changes will set the stage for further performance improvements to all statistics screens down the line.

We’re confident these updates will significantly improve performance and usability for all of you. Be sure to watch for them this coming week and as always we’ll be looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Based on the enthusiastic response of OpenX publishers to its recent search engine optimization webinar, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is making a new offer to our publishers. The IAB is opening up its next four Long Tail Alliance webinars to OpenX publishers for free.

Here are the upcoming webinar dates and topics:

October 2 - Ad Networks presented by ValueClick Media

October 9 - Social Media for Success: Driving Traffic, Engagement, and Response from Leading Social Sites

October 16 - Email Marketing Best Practices: The Key To Targeted, Relevant Marketing

October 23 - Legal Affairs Best Practices for Small Publishers

The webinars will all be held on Fridays from 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm (Eastern). To take part in any of these events, please visit www.iab.net/longtail_webinars. Although there is no charge for you to attend, you do need to register in advance.

Stay tuned for even more great offers from OpenX and the IAB soon… In the meantime, enjoy the webinars!

We’d like to inform you of a special offer that the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is making to OpenX publishers. The IAB regularly arranges educational webinars for members of their Long Tail Alliance members on topics relevant to medium and small publishers. They’ve opened up their next webinar - Search Engine Optimization - to OpenX publishers for free.

The webinar will be presented by Google search evangelist Adam Lasnik and is designed to help you make your site’s content more accessible for users and Google, and also gain insight into their comprehensive resources for webmasters. The webinar will be held on September 11th from 12:00 noon - 1:00 pm Eastern Time.

To take part in this, please visit www.iab.net/longtail_webinars. Although there is no charge for you to attend, you do need to register in advance.

Enjoy the webinar and be on the lookout for more great offers from OpenX and the IAB soon!

Are you a Facebook App developer? Starting today, you can manage the ads within your Facebook Apps with OpenX Hosted. Now, when you get the ad tag for a zone (on the zone’s Invocation Code tab), you will see a new type of invocation called “Facebook App Tag”. If you select this tag type, you will be given the tags necessary to make your ads appear in your Facebook Apps.

You can also target your Facebook App ads according to Age Group, Educational Attainment, Gender, and Relationship Status. All you need to do is go to your banner’s Delivery Options tab, select the desired demographic targeting criteria, and then choose which values you wish to target.

Of course, you’ll be able to use OpenX Hosted to manage the campaigns and reports for your Facebook App ads just like you would for any other type of ad. For more info on managing your Facebook App ads, click here.

Since announcing OpenX Market in April, we’ve been closely monitoring how well Market publishers have been monetizing their ad space. The early numbers have shown some very positive gains. Based on the data we’ve seen so far, the average revenue (on a CPM basis) from ads served by OpenX Market is 25% greater than the average floor price specified by publishers.

This uplift in revenue has been great news for the OpenX community. Moguldom Media Group, which operates a collection of entertainment news websites, sends more than 50 million ads per month to OpenX Market and has been one of the Market’s early success stories.

According to Moguldom CEO Marve Frazier, “OpenX Market has actually become one of our most significant sources of revenue. We’re especially pleased with the revenue lift that we receive by having the Market beat our floor price.”

When you combine these results with the fact that the Market is risk-free — meaning the publisher sets a floor price that OpenX Market must exceed in order to show ads — you get a very compelling way to earn more ad revenue. And getting started with the Market is easy. Check out our new getting started pages (featuring step-by-step videos):

• For OpenX Hosted users -
  How to sell on OpenX Market using OpenX Hosted

• For OpenX Download users -
  How to sell on OpenX Market using OpenX Download

Start earning more from your ad space today by selling on OpenX Market!