Humiliated by OpenX

[dvsDave]

So, I just suffered through a humiliating phone conference with OpenX. I had been using their onRamp service until last year when they shut it down without warning, leaving me to scramble for a new ad platform.

One of their reps emailed me and asked if we could set up a meeting to discuss ways of increasing my ad revenue.

I told him up front that I was unhappy with OpenX over the way they handled the OnRamp cut-off and that when one of their reps contacted me days after the shutdown and told me their enterprise platform was 5k a month, I told him that was insane for the amount of traffic I had.

So, the new rep wrote back and told me that " I would like to discuss our ad server with you and a monthly cost that makes sense. I would also like to discuss monetizing your unsold inventory through our exchange. There have been many positive changes with OpenX that will help alleviate the issues you have experienced in the past. "

I figured it was worth a shot.

So, I call into the phone conference and am chatting with the rep and one other guy. We talk about what I did when OnRamp shut down, what I went to, costs, and features. Then they ask me what my available monthly impressions would be. As it stands, about 250k per month available impressions.

The reps immediately got quiet and said that they only work with customers with 5 million monthly impressions or more.

I pointed out that no one is doing what they do for the well established, but not HUGE forums. This was a big market they could get into. I get about 3/4 of the way through that and they cut me off and basically tell me that "once I've grown from a small acorn to an oak tree", to contact them.

NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

I thought OpenX had changed, but apparently it's the same company it's always been.

 

[thedude]

We haven't dealt with them before but thanks for the heads up on how they are

 

[surfsup]

wow thats crazy....hah....I used to use Open X also but switched to EPOM, tell them i sent ya.

 

[dvsDave]

I'm on Adzerk at the moment, but I'll look into EPOM

 

[motowebmaster]

I've seen talks from the CEO of OpenX, and the guy does impress me. However, even when I owned a forum that was doing more than 5mil impressions per month I couldn't see how their team could make more money than I could on my own.

Regardless, OpenX had been telling everyone that their old hosted service was being shut down. It's just that no one was going to their support site to see the articles about it.

They also sold the OpenX Source software version to one of the original developers (before OpenX) and it is now called Revive Adserver. I using this and all of it's previous variants for many years (going back to the original phpadsnew), but admit that it is still a very large app that is best installed/upgraded at the command line.

I'll check into EPOM as well

 

[dvsDave]

Regardless, OpenX had been telling everyone that their old hosted service was being shut down. It's just that no one was going to their support site to see the articles about it.

Yes, they had been warning of a scheduled phaseout of hosted OpenX, but when they were hit by a DDoS attack, they just decided to shut it down immediately instead of the original scheduled phaseout. All of my data and campaign settings were inaccessible for days as I scrambled to get setup on another service. I had to rebuild our entire ad platform, all the settings, all the zones, everything from scratch. I lost a ton of revenue that month, issued as a discount on the next month of advertising for all of my advertisers. It was a nasty surprise, and was much earlier than the phaseout had indicated. In the end, they opened up the backend for a couple months so we could retrieve our data and stats, but even that was buggy as I ran reports.

 

[rseher]

there is now an open source version. I have been using it for over a month now

The Open Source Ad Server formerly known as OpenX Source
http://www.revive-adserver.com/

 

[akia]

I'm on Adzerk at the moment, but I'll look into EPOM

I find adzerk brilliant especially the pass back tags works so well.

 

[fEaRz]

there is now an open source version. I have been using it for over a month now

The Open Source Ad Server formerly known as OpenX Source
http://www.revive-adserver.com/

Do you know if it has support for responsive ads?

 

[rseher]

I don't think so? Never really thought about that. with open x you create website zones, and define the size of the ads that fit that zone. It then generates an invocation code, that you put on the page. Then later when you have ads, you check a box for what zone you want the ad to appear in (assuming the size of the banner matches the slot)
One thing I really liked was the ability to easily run ads on a bunch of my sites just by checking boxes.

 

[p4guru]

I pointed out that no one is doing what they do for the well established, but not HUGE forums. This was a big market they could get into. I get about 3/4 of the way through that and they cut me off and basically tell me that "once I've grown from a small acorn to an oak tree", to contact them.

NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.

I thought OpenX had changed, but apparently it's the same company it's always been.

wow very poor form in how they dealt with you - definitely wouldn't expect you contact them when you do grow to that size

Sorts of reminds me on an incident I had with a local real estate agent that came over to my house to discuss selling a house. After 30 mins of talks, he wanted sole agent exclusivity and I said no I prefer not to have a sole agent agreement. The agent immediately just got up and walked out the door !

 

[Joe Link]

Almost two years later, what're you using now?

 

[dvsDave]

so, since Adzerk has shut down, we have switched to a self-hosted ad server, mySimpleAds. http://www.clippersoft.net/ allows for self-service sales of ad slots. Matt, the creator, is great. Works well. I run tenacity campaigns (sell by time, not impressions) We offer x number of slots in a ad spot and rotate the ad every 9 seconds automatically till we detect the user/session has gone dormant. This 9 second rotation on 2 ad slots means that we log over 1.5 million impression a day. We had to tweak the software to allow us to handle that, but it's doable.

 

[audiokid]

I don't think so? Never really thought about that. with open x you create website zones, and define the size of the ads that fit that zone. It then generates an invocation code, that you put on the page. Then later when you have ads, you check a box for what zone you want the ad to appear in (assuming the size of the banner matches the slot)
One thing I really liked was the ability to easily run ads on a bunch of my sites just by checking boxes.
View attachment 68159

I've been using Revive inside a few different xenForo advertising add-ons but am tired of xF add-ons issues so I want to just use Revive inside the template of xenForo. However, I can't get them to be responsive this way.

Its not a Revive issue as I can use the same code in a Drupal site which the adds are then, 100% responsive. Any help how to get my Revive ads responsive on xenForo would be much appreciated!

 

[vbresults]

Why not Doubleclick?

 

[audiokid]

Why not Doubleclick?

Thanks for chiming in. I finally figured out there was an error in a clients code that was preventing their "doubleclick" ad from exposing correctly. After so much wasted time I finally figured this out.
All is good.

 

[cbpayne]

I've been using Revive inside a few different xenForo advertising add-ons but am tired of xF add-ons issues so I want to just use Revive inside the template of xenForo. However, I can't get them to be responsive this way.
Its not a Revive issue as I can use the same code in a Drupal site which the adds are then, 100% responsive. Any help how to get my Revive ads responsive on xenForo would be much appreciated!

I too use Revive on my Xenforo (and all my other) sites.
Had the same problem. But have not yet had time to look a fixing it, but did get this from my support person:

As you can see, the zone invocation code itself doesn't impose any kind of dimensions.
However, if you take a look at the banner you indicated, you might notice there is a checkbox under the code box, that informs the ad server that it is permitted to put a so-called "friendly iframe" around the banner. This results in the ad dimensions of (in this case) 728x90 being sent to Google AdSense. See the attached screenshot.
You could experiment with unchecking that checkbox, to see if that makes any difference for the ads being rendered by Google.

 

[audiokid]

Revive Adserver v4.0.1 is now responsive with xenforo.

 

[dvsDave]

Revive Adserver v4.0.1 is now responsive with xenforo.

I'm almost too hopeful to ask, but where did you see that?

 

[audiokid]

I'm almost too hopeful to ask, but where did you see that?

the update shows in my revive administration panel
http://yourdomain.com/revive/www/admin/updates-product.php
Or here: https://www.revive-adserver.com/