OpenX: impressive growth, new software version

A press releases and a software upgrade from OpenX were published almost at the same time yesterday. Almost 1 year after joining OpenX as CEO, Tim Cadogan picked April fool’s day to make some very serious announcements.

The first story was a press release about the phenomenal growth in the usage of the OpenX Ad Server product and the accompanying OpenX Market. A few highlights:

• More than 8,000 publishers have opened accounts on OpenX Hosted, together serving about 5 billion ads per month.
• OpenX Ad Server has been downloaded and installed by more than 35,000 publishers, and together they serve a huge number of ads, estimated at 300 billion per month.
• OpenX.org Ltd is doing very well in the transition from being a developer of open source software into a commercial company offering software, services and monetization opportunities. In spite of the economic climate, revenues are increasing. Even more important in my opinion: the potential for OpenX Market is not just a concept anymore, because participating publishers can tell from their revenues that OpenX is also generating revenues.

Just a few hours later, a major new software release was announced on the OpenX company blog: OpenX Ad Server version 2.8 is now available to anyone. It has some exciting new features and benefits, including the new plugin framework, general availability of OpenX Market, and improvements in the user interface, scabability and performance. More about the new software in my earlier blog post.

For many people, OpenX is the ad server they use every day, perhaps without giving it a lot of thought. They might not realize that a community of people work on OpenX software daily, enhancing and improving it.

Scott Switzer is OpenX’s founder and community leader. Scott put together a team 6 years ago to make OpenX a world class ad server, and he continues to lead the OpenX community and get them involved in creating this unique online ad serving product.

Erik Geurts is a longtime member of the OpenX community, and his full time job is consulting for companies who need help with OpenX. The chances are high that you have read Erik’s posts on the forum or his blog!

Scott and Erik will be in Amsterdam for an afternoon of questions and answers, road map discussions, and feedback sessions. Please come and meet Scott and Erik in Amsterdam on Thursday, March 26. This is a perfect opportunity to share your stories about OpenX, ask the questions you had on your mind for a long time, and meet other OpenX users.

This free informal event will start at 3 PM and will last until approximately 7 PM. The location is Cafe De Jaren, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20-22, 1012 CP Amsterdam.

A quick reminder of the practical details:

• Event: OpenX informal community session
• Date: Thursday, March 26, 2009
• Time: from 3 PM until 7 PM
• Location: Amsterdam, Café de Jaren, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20-22

There is no registration, but you are free to post a comment below if you plan to join us. Also see the announcement on LinkedIn

Measuring cost per action advertising

In the first article in this series, I suggested changing the pricing of advertising campaigns based on impressions to pricing them based on the number of clicks. And in the second article, I went a little bit further and argued that it might be even better to agree on a cost per action pricing scheme.

If an advertiser is considering ending an impression based or click based advertising campaign, a publisher could try to turn the relationship into a partnership by offering CPA (cost per action) advertising. In that scenario, the site publisher will get paid for a specifically defined outcome that the advertiser is aiming for.

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After my previous post about working with clients in many time zones, I was wondering in just how many different parts of the worlds they are. So I put some markers on a map, and here is the result:

Time Zone Check shows the time zones on a pretty map

Since I started my company, I’ve worked with many people from all across the globe. Five or ten years ago, this would have been virtually impossible, or at least extremely expensive. My telephone bill would have gone through the roof. But today, with e-mail, instant messaging and Skype, it’s easy and affordable to communicate with people everywhere.

So now that distance and communication costs are no longer an issue, I’ve found that there is a new challenge: finding the right time to talk. With clients in many time zones, this sometimes takes a lot of calculating and planning. Fortunately, the web offers nice tools to manage this too. One of the prettiest I know is Time Zone Check. This site shows me a map of the world, with my own current local time. Then, when I point my mouse at the location of someone I would like to talk to, the map shows me what time it is in their part of the world. I can even search for cities by name if I don’t know the exact location.

The map also shows me where it is night and where it is day, the places in the world where they’re currently enjoying daylight savings, the abbreviations of the time zones and the time difference between those time zones and my own time zone.