Let’s see what’s cooking with Openx over the last few days.
Wondering About Getting Advertisers For Your Site?
In a forum post, staffer Stephanc, in response to a query about how the Openx admarket works for advertisers, indicated that due to the fact that the program is still in beta, they are not accepting referrals of potential advertisers from web site publishers. Click here to read the thread
Unfortunately, the original questions asked were, by and large, ignored. It would really be helpful for publishers to be able to learn what the system is like for advertisers. Bit of a mystery as to why that information doesn’t appear.
Concern Over Spam/Inappropriate Ads/Spam Coming Through OpenX Market
There have been a few posts over the months about publishers concerned that the ads being shown on their sites are not the ones they want, are inappropriate, or involve intrusive creatives, like popups. If you have a concern about these issues, here’s some stuff that’s good to know.
Virtually all ad networks come with a risk of inappropriate ads, and I know that major networks, like Burstmedia, Casalemedia and Valueclick have all, at one point or another, served questionable ads despite taking every reasonable precaution. The reason this occurs is that advertisers can present one advertisement for approval, and once receiving approval, change the ad to something undesirable. That also circumvents any preferences you migh have set (e.g. deny adult ads, smoking ads, etc).
There is simply no reasonable and practical solution to completely prevent these problems. Networks that are less professional will probably carry with them more risk to users, while the more professional ad serving networks will carry much less risk. We really don’t know where OpenX will fall on this issue. In fact we may never know, because Openx may be open source software, but it’s awful stingy with most information.
Anyway, right now, what you need to know is that it IS possible to receive unpleasant unwanted ads from OpenX market BUT, that’s not a problem specific to them, but to all companies serving third party ads.
Apparent Complete OpenX Outage on Saturday – No Announcement
From others, and our own tests it appears that OpenX was completely unavailable across sub-domains for about 30 minutes on Saturday. Forums, adservers, admin interface were all unavailable from here. Sometimes outages can be local, but it appears others experienced these problems.
Obviously it’s a concern. Any adserving outage is a concern because of potential lost direct revenue, but also the possibility that an ad server problem can cause website pages to hang, not load properly, (we’ll talk about this issue in the future), etc).
What is a concern is that no announcement was made, or has been made acknowledging the outage, despite the fact that it was mentioned in twitter by third parties. We have noticed that OpenX does not communicate very well with its users/publishers. Only they can explain why, so you’ll have to draw your own conclusions.
As always we welcome comments or questions.
