As a small business, you may want to show ads to your website visitors to promote your services or products, or to increase income from programs such as Google Adsense, or affiliate programs. You may even want to sell ad space on your site.
Leaving aside the issue of whether you should show “ads”, let’s assume that you can do so professionally, and without damaging the user experience. How do you display the ads, rotate them, and so on?
It used to be, in the old days, that you had to buy, at substantial cost, a server program to manage and show the ads to visitors. Then, some people put together some software, phpadsnew, that was released as open source and available free. Problem with that, and it’s incarnations, was that it could slow down lower end website hosts and servers.
Most recently two entries into the free adserving “market” have been made available — hosted solutions from Google, and from Openx (the successor to phpadsnew). Neither will impact upon the load of your webserver and both are free, provide substantial bandwidth, and can be used to serve your own ads, serve affiliate and adsense ads, or used to sell ads.
We’ll leave the reviews of the two “competitors” to others, since they can be rather complex, or not intuitive for users. In any event, they are available at:
As we have more time we’ll try to provide more information about these options from a relatively non-technical perspective.
