

Ask HN: OpenX for ad management? - briandear

Is OpenX a good tool for ad management for a website with 40K page views per day or is there a better solution?
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pauldi
Having used OpenX for several years I wouldn't recommend it.

We used both the (free) hosted version and also hosted it ourselves. Either
way it had a habit of hanging for no apparent reason. This didn't seem related
to site load though, sometimes it just dozed off. When it was running "well"
performance was OK but never earth shattering. To answer your specific
question; with the right hardware 40k views shouldn't strain OpenX though it
depends on the number of ads you have per page and whether you can use
optimisations like Single Page Call. To give you an idea we used a single
medium instance on EC2 and it worked fine, even coping with some meaty traffic
spikes during TV advertising. We averaged 3 ad units per page.

Putting aside performance issues it was my experience that OpenX wasn't that
reliable a delivery platform. It would frequently under deliver for no
apparent reason.

Delivery issues are well documented if you search for "openx under
delivering". It's been going on years. Thinking we were doing something stupid
we got in one of the leading OpenX consultants who confirmed it's a "quirk" of
OpenX. The way to "fix" it was through fudging the system with bizarre
combinations of remnant ads and weightings. We upgraded several times to a
version that was slated to fix the problems but it never did. The last time we
upgraded was early this year (can't remember the specific version) but that
didn't help.

If all you're doing is using your own Google Ads (or other in-house ads) then
under delivery is less of an issue. If you're selling inventory to 3rd party
agencies you'll soon become fed up with explaining why you continuously under
deliver. Not only is it embarrassing it's bad commercially as well.

I don't have a great deal of experience with other ad platforms but if I ever
need to do ads again I'll look into Google DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).
It's free upto a large number of monthly impressions and based on a comparison
I did at the start of this year it can do pretty much anything OpenX could do
- the only slight headache was targeting in DFP is not as straight forward as
OpenX. Other than that I'd happily have migrated to DFP but just didn't have
the time.

Hope that helps, Paul.

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javery
To pimp my own startup - take a look at Adzerk (<http://adzerk.com>). We are
getting lots of ex-OpenX users who want something faster and more reliable.

