OpenX Tips

A bit of a general advertising world news round-up this week — don’t worry, The Guru has a couple of OpenX tip posts lined up for the next few weeks!

Yahoo!’s ad network getting some bad press for malvertising

Yahoo!’s Right Media has had some bad press lately for being one of the ad networks most guilty of serving up malware on publisher sites — and especially for past comments that this is somehow the publisher’s fault!

… while Google appears to be trying to do something about it

Meanwhile, Google has been getting some good press for its anti-malvertising site, which includes some tips for publishers on how to try to avoid displaying malvertising on your site.

Google moves into retargeting

Retargeting has been covered on OpenX Tips before, and to prove that this is not just a fancy tool that no-one is really using, Google are now offering retargeting on their AdWords campaigns. Are you thinking about how you can run retargeting on your advertisers campaigns yet?

Advertising spend on the up

Finally, some good news to finish up with! Apparently online advertising spend is on the up again, after a bit of a dip.

In the last week, OpenX announced the Orange Ad Market.

As far as The Guru can tell, this sounds like OpenX is licensing their OpenX Market technology to Orange, and there’s no plans for opening up the OpenX Market to additional inventory from Orange’s advertisers.

However, it’s still (hopefully) good news for OpenX users — The Guru continues to hope that the more revenue OpenX can generate, the more likely it is that OpenX will return to its roots and start looking after OpenX download users again…

Well, sort of. The Guru comes back from a break to find that while the release file of OpenX 2.8.5 is up on the OpenX site, there’s been no announcement from OpenX about this release, there’s nothing in the release notes in the download, and there are issues in OpenX’s own issue tracking system with regards to the release that are not resolved.

OpenX community member Erik Geurts has already posted a warning about this release – and his advice to avoid this release for now sounds eminently sensible, at least until someone from OpenX lets us know what’s going on. OpenX team, you out there???

Hi OpenX Tips readers! Thanks for sticking around — it’s hard to believe that OpenX Tips is nearly a year old!

To celebrate, The Guru is taking a couple of weeks off — but don’t worry, there are plenty of tips still to come!

See you all here again in March…

Really important news for OpenX Hosted users, as OpenX today announce an update made to OpenX Hosted last week that potentially impacts user’s specifically set banner delivery weights.

As you know, campaign and banner weights are an important part of the OpenX delivery process, as they define how often different campaigns and banners will be displayed in relation to other campaigns and banners.

In this announcement in the OpenX forums, OpenX have announced that when a campaign has all banners set with the default weight of 1, instead of delivering all of the banners in the campaign an approximately equal number of times, OpenX Hosted will now automatically decide how many times each banner should be delivered.

This is great news, if you want this type of functionality — the ability to let OpenX decide which banners should be delivered to optimize performance of your campaigns is a long awaited feature. However, all OpenX Hosted users should be aware that this change would appear to have gone live, and will affect anyone who has set up their campaigns with all banners having the default weights of 1, even if you don’t actually want this feature enabled, and you would prefer that all of your banners in a campaign are delivered an equal number of times.

You can see The Guru’s follow up thread to OpenX on the forums, where, hopefully, the OpenX team will follow up on this change in default behavior…