OK, to speak to the first point...

Self-serve - you're right, it doesn't have that.  But seriously,  
unless you're Google or someone else with an absolutely massive  
potential base of advertisers, who on earth is going to want to self- 
serve ads?  Federated Media offers self service, and I would almost  
guarantee that 99% of their business is done in the way traditional  
media sales have always been done - on the phone and in meetings.   
For the most part, anyone who has dealt with ad buyers will tell you  
that self-service is a non-starter, not least because most of these  
buyers are almost completely clueless.  But that's just my take.

Server config:

We were very clever about the way we ran things, I think.  We ran  
both our website and the OpenAds server off the same group of boxes.   
We had three relatively medium spec boxes: dual Xeons with a couple  
of gigs of RAM, one of which handled database and two of which were  
webservers.  We used memcache to avoid having to poll the server for  
every request, and ran the servers on a superfast switch and opened  
up plenty of ports.  The DBs were lean and mean, and our CSS was  
neat.  We used a javascript implementation of OpenAds, and managed  
everything directly from the OpenAds backend, integrating it into our  
own custom CMS.

Using this kind of mid-range set up (cost less than $500 a month to  
rent from The Planet.com), running Apache/MySQL/Red Hat, we served 5m  
web pages a month, each with 5 dynamically rotating / frequently  
updating ad slots, making for 20m ads a month served with accurate  
metrics.  On days when we hit Digg, we could easily serve half a  
million pages in a day without noticing any slowdown.

With some clever coding and architecture, OpenAds scales well.  I  
know of at least one other site a friend of mine has that serves 50+  
ads a month off it with a relatively  modest server config.

Of course, none of this applies directly to video advertising, but is  
a great implementation for videobloggers looking to put banners on  
their sites - free, and relatively easy to set up, especially if  
you're not doing humungous numbers.

Wil.


On 27 Jul 2007, at 18:06, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:

> Hello Wil,
>
> On 7/27/07, Wil Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > OpenAds is absolutely stonking - I used it in a former life when I
> > was a website guy and OpenAds was phpAds. It does absolutely
> > everything you want in an ads system, and then some.
>
> I don't know if everyone would agree with that.
>
> AFAIK... it doesn't have a self-serve component... where advertisers
> can come and signup... pay money... and buy advertisers without you
> (the publisher) having to anything.
>
> (Disclaimer... I've created a number of ad networks for various
> companies. Sorry to everyone who hates online advertising :-) )
>
> > Also check out
> > MaxMediaManager, which is a code fork of the same thing and has some
> > interesting differentiators. OpenAds needs some love to set up to
> > scale, but is perfectly capable of running ads for just about any
> > website on the planet.
> >
> > Happy to provide any more details on or offlist.
> >
> > Wil.
>
> BTW... if you don't mind sharing information....
>
> I'm curious to see some statistics on it from someone who's actually
> used it in production.
>
> What kind of server configuration did you have it running in?... and
> how much traffic could it handle?
>
> See ya
>
> -- 
> Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. <http://ChangeLog.ca/>
>
> Vlog Razor... Vlogging News
> http://vlograzor.com/
>
> 



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