Why OpenX is still “king” of the proverbial online advertising mountain

If you’ve been busy building up your forum, blog, wiki or social networking service lately, you’ll probably get to the point where you need to generate some revenue to keep the ball rolling.

Managing online advertising can be a royal pain but if you happen to be running OpenX, you already know how much fun it is.

In fact, the word “fun” is a gross understatement.

Exhilirating might be more like it.

For starters, OpenX is made available for free as a rock solid open source release which, for version 2.6.3, weighs a cool 10.5 MB of PHP coding muscle which banks on MySQL‘s awesome data management power to take you —and your advertisers— on a wonderfully enjoyable and productive e-ride.

The fundamental setup in OpenX is built around the logic of having “Advertisers” on one side, feeding banners and clickable slogans and “Websites” at the other end, displaying them. This very logical approach makes this script a breeze to get your head around… and the rest just goes from there.

For every banner you program OpenX to handle, you’ll find a wide range of preferences you can toy with like, for instance, when that particular banner should display and when it shouldn’t — and for who. The whole nine yards, really. And the same can be said about the many ways said banner can be made visible in the web site since, on that end too, the choices should make integration especially easy.

Then come “the statistics” featuring a balanced dose of numbers that’ll help you understand what’s going on without burrying you under a pile of useless metrics. As an added bonus, such statistical clarity is bound to make your advertisers love your choice for such a straightforward advertising script. Advertisers demand answers regarding the way their ads have been delivered and OpenX will prove to be a dependable ally to achieve this, time and again.

Theoretically, the script accepts an unlimited number of… everything! Advertisers, banners, web sites, you name it. OpenX doesn’t appear to be “limited” in any significant way, unlike so many other online advertising scripts. I say theoretically because I’m not aware of anybody who’s taken the time to test the limits of this open source script. As a rule of thumb, if you run an OpenX ad server on a web server featuring unlimited hard disk space, sky is probably going to be the limit, for you.

Over and above all that’s already been said, the installation procedure takes just a few minutes and goes so smoothly, you barely notice that you’ve just installed the hottest open source online advertising solution, on Earth! It’s -that- smooth, people.

If you enjoy participating in vibrant open source communities, you’ll see that OpenX’s is precisely one of those. Their blog is a living testament to the vitality of their movement but also, their originality.

So if getting your very own “twin-turbo, V10 engine-inspired” ad server sounds like a plan, download the latest OpenX release, install it and see for yourself how RIGHT ON THE MONEY we are about this fine piece of open source code.

Tags: openx, ad server, php, mysql, open source, online advertising, ad script, advertisers, publishers, ad stats, statistics, banners, text links, clickable slogans, adsense boxes, fast ad serving, free, fast, fun, efficient