Small Business Talk

While CEO Tim Cadogan is out there creating a buzz about the open source ad serving software, OpenX, and it’s free hosted counterpart, users are struggling with a variety of problems that reflect an organization that is experiencing problems. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about Mr. Cadogan appearing at one event or another, speaking about how OpenX will revolutionize or revitalize the online ad industry, both for web publishers and web advertisers. Hardly a day goes by that new and fairly serious bugs are not reported on OpenX’s own forums, and even worse, often the bugs remain for days, weeks or months.

If you a small business, wanting to serve ads, you need to carefully consider what you are doing with regard to OpenX, particularly with respect to their free hosted solution, which is what we’ll concentrate on here. In a later article, we’ll talk about the stand alone version.

OpenX Hosted – Fabulous Idea, Broken Implementation

The possibility of serving ads to website visitors at NO cost is entirely seductive to any business owner that has a need for that function, because the cost of serving ads by running one’s own server could run in the hundreds of dollars just for the dedicated hardware, maintenance and software.

When OpenX announced and then made its free hosted system available to the public it was, indeed an exciting event, at least until it became clear that it didn’t work well, and at this writing, doesn’t work well).

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

While Openx staff have suggested that overloaded servers and other technical difficulties have resulted in blank ads being served 1% of the time, users have suggested it is closer to 10%, or even higher, event AFTER Openx’s recent announcement that they improved the percentage to 0.01%. The blank ad problem has been an issue for months. What that means, if the 10% figure is accurate, at least for some unfortunate users, is that they are also losing 10% of their revenue, or value coming from those ads.

What is even more concerting is the time its’ taken to resolve the problem. Frankly, a free service that doesn’t work is too expensive.

That’s ONE example, but if you want to see what’s going on, take a look at their forums at http://forum.openx.org/. That’s where desparate users are asking, or begging for help. In fact, some users are offering to pay for help to get their openx systems running (that’s not necessarily a viable option either).

If you really want to get a fright, check out the developer’s area to see the crazy number of bugs that have been reported, but have not been announced in places users will see them. (I don’t have the url, and its not that easy to find. I’ll add it later).

But here’s a rundown of recent issues.

• ads don’t serve because the Openx Market server if broken or timing out
• ads timing out because adservers overloaded or for other reasons
• conversions not working, or other tracking problems resulting in meaningless statistics
• statistics not available at all (I can’t access mine on a regular basis – it’s been 4 months)
• ad probabilities messed up so some ads overshowing and some not showing at all.

Almost every day something new pops up. It is true that some of the problems users are experiencing have to do with user error, but many are caused by software or server problems.

Information? Who Ya Gonna Call

Information from OpenX regarding how its programs work is sketchy, sometimes inconsistent, sometimes wrong. Documentation is terrible. It’s not unheard of for one staff member to say one thing that either conflicts with published information, or is in direct conflict with what another staff person says.

For example, in the forum one of the major support people announced that OpenX hosted is free provided impressions are less than one million per month despite the fact that its been widely publicized that the limit is 100 million impressions per month. In another instance, an OpenX support person on twitter informed a user that the hosted version of OpenX and the non-hosted version are identical. They aren’t. That’s not a trivial mistake, since the bugs and problems of each can be quite different.

There IS no authoritative source of information about either version of the software, hosted or non-hosted, and news about problems is skimpy at best. Forum emails have often been ignored completely. But wait!

OpenX has a page where it provides information about its systems. It’s at http://www.openx.org/en/system-performance . As of this writing it’s showing no problems for May 16, and 17. This is clearly not true. I couldn’t access my stats yesterday. A number of people are complaining that they are getting “pear errors” starting both yesterday and continuing today. Yet, according to OpenX, it’s all good.

If there is anything worse than running a buggy system, it’s running a buggy system and hiding the fact from prospective and current users. Whether this is intentional or not, and we have no way of knowing, it’s unacceptable.

An Additional Problem

If it was the case that a user/business owner could sign up and use the system without commiting time and effort to the implementation (and then the dis-implementation) some of these problems would be less worrisome. But that’s not so. It takes time to set up ads, and put the code on webpages. It can take significant time, particularly when things don’t always work as expected, or, as is the case here, documentation is outdated or even sometimes  wrong.

So, the business owner invests time into getting things working in the first place, and then, in the event that s/he is not willing to accept the lost revenues or opportunities resulting from a system that doesn’t work very well, then the whole system has to be removed. That’s because some of the bugs we’ve seen actually prevent entire webpages from loading, or the entire pages load so slowly that visitor traffic drops because people won’t wait.

In fact that’s what we experienced and had to spend some 20-40 hours removing the code and replacing it with a similar system offered by google.

The killing blow, though, is that any time and effort you put into getting OpenX hosted online will be totally wasted in the event that you decide you can’t use it due to bugs. The data isn’t transferable. It should be. OpenX, at one point, promised it would be exportable and could be moved to one’s own server, but so far, no dice. In fact, you can’t even back up your data in OpenX hosted. You are completely reliant on them for data security.

End of The Line

There’s much more to be said about the OpenX organization and its products, and we’ll do that shortly. However, at this point, if you want to use OpenX hosted, keep in mind that its buggy, still, and that the time you invest is not transferable. Frankly, it’s just not ready at all. It has negative value for many. If you want to sell advertising using the system, to third party advertisers, my recommendation is to stay clear of OpenX hosted, since any problems with it will be passed on directly to your paying customes.

We welcome specific comments from Openx.

(this is an unedited version and will be updated shortly)