Multi-domain ad-serving software?

CTXMedia

Well-known member
I'm looking for suggestions for ad-serving software that I can use to manage inventory across a number of sites/forums.

I'm prepared to pay for a decent platform but my budget only runs to a few hundred dollars, not thousands, so keep it reasonable.

Many, many moons ago I used Advert Pro, but they've moved onto an impressions based licensing model now (goodness knows why) and I suspect there are better, faster products available now.

I've also heard about Open X and understand you can donwload and use it for free - is that right?

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
How about Google? They have this "Doubleclick for publishers" system. It's free for now (although their TOS states this may change). You can set up your own campaigns, own advertisers, share your data with advertisers etc. You can use adsense for the empty spots to get extra income.

google.com/dfp
 
... "Doubleclick for publishers" ... google.com/dfp

Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.

The site is a little short on technical detail (well at least for the brief overview I gave it). Can you host your own ads with dfp? I.E.; can I use my shopping cart to sell an ad-package to an advertiser, upload their ad, then set priority over Adsense ads, etc. and put the paying advertisers first in rotation?

Does anyone currently use dfp and how are you finding it?

Cheers,
Shaun :D


Thanks :)
 
Many sites use OpenX, it's free and has a good amount of features.
The major downside for me: it's popular so from time to time you will face attacks due to security problems.
 
Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.

The site is a little short on technical detail (well at least for the brief overview I gave it). Can you host your own ads with dfp? I.E.; can I use my shopping cart to sell an ad-package to an advertiser, upload their ad, then set priority over Adsense ads, etc. and put the paying advertisers first in rotation?

Does anyone currently use dfp and how are you finding it?

Cheers,
Shaun :D

Thanks :)

I use DFP. Yes you can do all of the above. It may require you to set it up differently than other systems you may have used in the past but DFP is excellent and the best ad serving system out there and all for Free!

Read the Getting Started Guide and experiment with it. In my experience most people don't get it right the first time, so play with it until you figure out everything,
 
Thanks for the comments so far.

Can you use OpenX across domains, or would I need to install an instance of it at each site?
 
Great stuff. I might just give it a try. (y)

Many forums have been hacked lately that ran OpenX. Well, probably other sites, too, but I only read about them on forum sites. I believe there was talk about it over here at xenforo.com, too, someone's forum being hacked through OpenX. I may be wrong, but I remember reading something like this...
 
It rings a bell ... using the ad-code to inject something .... ?

I'll look that up later on ... thanks for the reminder.
 
The site is a little short on technical detail (well at least for the brief overview I gave it). Can you host your own ads with dfp? I.E.; can I use my shopping cart to sell an ad-package to an advertiser, upload their ad, then set priority over Adsense ads, etc. and put the paying advertisers first in rotation?

You can set up your own ads, set priorities, even give advertisers read-only access to their own campaigns. I think many advertisers trust Google's auduting on the number of impressions and clicks. There is a lot more credibility to these reports than by running your own ad-server, with access to modify any data as you see fit. :) There's no such cheating through google. :)
 
How about Google? They have this "Doubleclick for publishers" system. It's free for now (although their TOS states this may change). You can set up your own campaigns, own advertisers, share your data with advertisers etc. You can use adsense for the empty spots to get extra income.

google.com/dfp
What is their business model with this? How do they make money if we replace OpenX with this and sell directly to our clients, and use Google servers to host the banners.
 
its true, it happened last summer around june or july. openx quickly released a fix.
its a risk to take with any popular script. its not that frequent tho. as long as you keep it up to date you should be "safe"
 
How about Google? They have this "Doubleclick for publishers" system. It's free for now (although their TOS states this may change). You can set up your own campaigns, own advertisers, share your data with advertisers etc. You can use adsense for the empty spots to get extra income.

google.com/dfp
you can also place an adsense code in openx.
 
OpenX latest version is 2.8.7 and looking at their recent push for enterprise solution, it seems like the self-serve hosting solution will get less and less updates in the future.
 
What is their business model with this? How do they make money if we replace OpenX with this and sell directly to our clients, and use Google servers to host the banners.

I'm not a google-employee, so I may be wrong here, but I assume they are after your "empty spots" with this offer. 1, once you realize you (and google) can make money from that, you may use it more; 2, they have more data about your site, even if you only run a very few percentage of adsense ads, and they can make targetting work even better = more money.

These are just my assumptions. I was a little surprised to see this as a totally free service, too. Especially considering that running an ad-server can make a huge traffic and server-load, which is all handled by google in this case.
 
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