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Digital Point Ads

digitalpoint

digitalpoint

Well-known member
Digital Point Ads was something I built because we were outgrowing Google AdSense. It's a feature complete marketplace where people can buy advertising on your site. For us (digitalpoint.com) our ad revenue increased by 450% over Google AdSense without adding or changing any placements.

Installation
  • Put the contents of the library directory into your XenForo library directory.
  • Install the addon_digitalpointAds.xml file in your Admin Control Panel -> Install Add-on option.
screen_advertisers.webp screen_adformat.webpscreen_banner.webp

Ad types supported:
  • Banners (the same 12 sizes that AdSense supports)
  • Inline Keyword Ads
  • Static Home Page Links
  • Email Ads hopefully coming soon on XenForo (we can't edit the mail object for outgoing email at this point)
Pubisher Notes:
  • Site owners can fall back to any other ad system when there is no ads to deliver (for example you could display AdSense any time there are no banners to serve).
  • Advertisers pay you directly via PayPal so you get your money before ads are run.
  • You have full control over which ads get approved for your site.
Advertiser Notes:
  • Advertisers make bids for ad space so your ad revenue is market driven (site owners of course set minimum bids)
  • Advertisers can target specific areas. For example maybe an advertiser only wants to run banner ads on threads in a certain forum.
  • Advertisers can geotarget end-users.
For inline keyword-based ads, the system will ad no more than 1 link per post based on keywords that advertisers bid for on a CPC (cost per click) basis.

You can see an example of the inline keyword ads (please don't click them as they are PPC): http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=2084098

It's NOT a completely standalone system... The XenForo addon allows XenForo sites to hook into the backend for various things (like get keywords being bid on for your site, tells the backend what forums you have so advertisers can target them, etc.) The resource requirement to run the backend makes it not practical for average sites.

If you want to learn more about the system itself, you can find info here: http://www.digitalpointads.com/
 

Attachments

I'm trying to understand this a bit better. We currently use OpenX on our server and sell advertising directly to our clients.

How do you compare this with Openx? What type of ads format can this serve? Video/flash?

Does it come with complete statistic reporting for advertisers?

And you mention that it requires some serious server resource. Can you qualify that? What kind of server does it need?
 
OpenX doesn't really have a bidding system (at least not that I'm aware of). Also I don't think OpenX allows targeting specific forums only. OpenX doesn't do inline keyword ads.

Advertisers get full reporting.

As far as server resources, it doesn't require any since we run the backend... was just saying the reason it's *not* a stand alone system is because of the server requirements needed for the backend.
 
Oh, so this plugin will connect my site to your DP ads system where you handle the bid, ads serving, etc just like Google Ads Manager and OpenX Market?

And you get commission for ads run on other XF forums that use this?
 
Correct... Digital Point Ads is a system where a site has their own ad marketplace and we serve the ads for you. We run the backend stuff... we looked into ways of making it a stand-alone system that people could install it and run it all on their own... but it just wasn't easy enough to make it realistic.

The backend requires things like PHP to be recompiled to handle math properly to 1/10,000 of a cent (normally PHP can't handle that without going into scientific notation). There's also a "helper" daemon that the backend servers run that handles threaded processes that take more than a fraction of a second. It's doing realtime calculation of cost (including down-bidding) for every pageview/impression. And just the general data storage on the backend for reporting is pretty substantial (there's about 15GB of reporting data in there so far just for digitalpoint.com).

Also to answer your earlier question, for banner ads, currently text-based, GIF, JPG and PNG banners are supported, but we are doing some final testing for Flash based banners as well. So those should be enabled shortly.
 
Makes good sense though I can see why it will be needed for some forums that want to outsource and automate their ads selling work. It may not make sense for some niche that there isn't much bid/ask to go.
Thanks for your work, Shaw. You always have interesting mods here and we hope to see more from you.
 
Yeah... it's definitely not something for everyone... that was never the intent. It was mainly built out of necessity for digitalpoint.com as an in-house advertising system, and then just expanded so it could handle external sites.
 
digitalpoint said:
OpenX doesn't really have a bidding system (at least not that I'm aware of). Also I don't think OpenX allows targeting specific forums only. OpenX doesn't do inline keyword ads.

Advertisers get full reporting.

As far as server resources, it doesn't require any since we run the backend... was just saying the reason it's *not* a stand alone system is because of the server requirements needed for the backend.
Click to expand...

Exactly what Digital said, he is correct.

Openx is for ge-location and bulk ad campaign management/delivery. This addon is entirely different and complimentary; both working together is pretty much THE ad solution.

I was actually looking for a bidding add-on myself for quite sometime. Now, I'm all set thanks to Digital.


MAJOR points if you keep up development for additional features.
 
Salty said:
MAJOR points if you keep up development for additional features.
Click to expand...
That's the plan for sure. The 4th ad type (text link ads) isn't something we offer at digitalpoint.com, but they were added because of demand from publishers.

Working on allowing Flash banners (internally the system already supports it), but it needs to go beyond "just supporting". You need to take into account people trying to insert malicious Flash code into people's sites as banners and stuff. So that's where the testing has bee going on mostly... being able to detect "bad" Flash and such.

Have some additional things I'm working on as well like giving advertisers a sort of "banner creator" where they can create basic animated/graphical banners from within the web interface (probably will be CSS3/HTML5 type of stuff with the new canvas objects).
 
digitalpoint said:
That's the plan for sure. The 4th ad type (text link ads) isn't something we offer at digitalpoint.com, but they were added because of demand from publishers.

Working on allowing Flash banners (internally the system already supports it), but it needs to go beyond "just supporting". You need to take into account people trying to insert malicious Flash code into people's sites as banners and stuff. So that's where the testing has bee going on mostly... being able to detect "bad" Flash and such.

Have some additional things I'm working on as well like giving advertisers a sort of "banner creator" where they can create basic animated/graphical banners from within the web interface (probably will be CSS3/HTML5 type of stuff with the new canvas objects).
Click to expand...

That is a newsletter I would subscribe to.
 
digitalpoint said:
That's the plan for sure. The 4th ad type (text link ads) isn't something we offer at digitalpoint.com, but they were added because of demand from publishers.

Working on allowing Flash banners (internally the system already supports it), but it needs to go beyond "just supporting". You need to take into account people trying to insert malicious Flash code into people's sites as banners and stuff. So that's where the testing has bee going on mostly... being able to detect "bad" Flash and such.

Have some additional things I'm working on as well like giving advertisers a sort of "banner creator" where they can create basic animated/graphical banners from within the web interface (probably will be CSS3/HTML5 type of stuff with the new canvas objects).
Click to expand...

Dam Shawn... i think you should be working for a big company :D
 
Why work for a big company, have no say in what goes on and be paid less than he's worth.....when he can just own his own company and make all the loot :D

Great work on the ad system. So, this is totally managed on your end, right? Is there a 'referral' link/page or something else to help with advertisers that may want to advertise on our site (or similar ones)?
 
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