Hello Wil, On 7/27/07, Wil Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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.
My experience has been that medium sized businesses and up want it. It's true that sales usually happen over the phone or in person. But I've found that you really don't want to manage their day-to-day activities for them. It's not scalable (from a business and HR point of view)... and you end up needing alot of staff to do alot of "hand holding". > 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. What was your average number of hits per second you were doing?... And your maximum number of hits per second you got? (I.e., what were you traffic spikes like?) Also... (if you tested it...) do you know how many hits per second it took before you started getting error messages? > 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. I've actually been thinking of doing an (opensource) video advertising component to the VideoPress series of Wordpress plugins... (given my experience... it would be pretty easy to write...) although I'm not sure that would jive with the "Show in a Box"... it's geared towards a sponsorship model. Thanks for taking the time to write about those stats! See ya > 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/ > > > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > -- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. <http://ChangeLog.ca/> Vlog Razor... Vlogging News http://vlograzor.com/
