All these days, when there is a search for an organisation, eg Yahoo, the results used to show one result from their website and then results from other sites with the information on Yahoo.

With the change made by Google, the results now show multiple results from Yahoo website. In some instances, there are as many as eight results shown from the same site. This change is tactical and is going to result in the following:

1. Users are going to see more irrelevant results on page one and hence will be tempted to click on the ‘Sponsored results’ on the right side, as it gives them more options to choose from. This will result in increase in the profits for the Adwords program through which Google shows the sponsored results.

2. Users are going to see less of Search Engine Optimized sites and hence the value of Search Engine Optimization will go down.

3. Users are going to be tempted to getting used to clicking the Adwords regularly thus enabling this habit and hence raising the value of Google stocks

Ultimately, it appears Google is bent on showing us how to search and it is because of their sheer dominance in the online world.

AdSense along with AdWords is the primary revenue generating engine for Google. All these days, the publishers on AdSense network had no clue about the percentage of cut that Google was retaining. There were many speculations in the past that Google keeps 50% of the ad revenue from the advertisers and only gives 50% to the publishers.

Today, Google has come out with a blog referring to the fact that they wanted to be more transparent to their users. It is a very good move and is a positive step in the right direction.

The full details are available here:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

Good job Google.

An interesting thing happened last week. We realized that Openx 2.8.5 is available for download, though there was no official announcement about it. The home page on OpenX website still shows that OpenX 2.8.4 is available for download, though we were able to download OpenX 2.8.5.

Our server support team went ahead and downloaded the latest version, ran it through our usual ‘New Downloads Review’ process and after verfiying it, approved it as ‘Ready for Production Use’. Based on this verification, late last week we have now installed it on our ad server and have not seen any visible issues with it. We will continue to monitor this latest version and see how it performs.

In any case, we are still wondering why OpenX have forgotten to announce the availability of v2.8.5.

These ads currently are only for image ads and appear to be only for CPM based ads (We are yet to verify this). Adsense does give the publishers the ability to block ads from one or more adnetworks.

Some of the certified adnetworks are ValueClick, Chitika, DSNR, OpenX, etc. The full list of the certified AdNetworks is provided at the end of this blog, but the interesting point is to think why Google would allow other adnetworks to leverage its platform.

One might wonder why Google would allow a part of its inventory to be eaten up by other competing ad networks. We could think of some of the possible reasons which are provided below:

1. Google now gets control over which ad is served on which website, which falls into google’s history of ‘do no evil but collect every possible data everywhere’.

2. Google can facilitate better targeted ads in those areas in which it does not have a niche, where one of the other adnetworks might have an advantage.

In any case, it is a very interesting feature and has to be observed closely in the months to come.

We will try it our ourselves and update here on how the experience is.
Full List of Google AdSense Certified AdNetworks:

AccountNow, Inc.
Acxiom Corporation
Ad Pepper
Adchemy
Adconion Media Group
Adpepper Germany
AdReady
Adtegrity.com
Advertise.com
Aggregate Knowledge
Announce Media
AOL Inc
AppNexus
Atrinsic
AudienceScience Inc.
Bizo
Brand.net
BrightRoll
Chitika
ClickDistrict NL
Collective Media
Cossette Communications
CPM Advisors, Inc
Criteo Europe
Criteo UK
Criteo US
Cyberplex, Inc
Dapper Inc.
DataXu
Datran Media
Dedicated Media
Didit
Dotomi
DQ
DSNR
EchoSearch
Efficient Frontier, Inc.
Epic Advertising
FetchBack
Goodway Group
HTTPool
Hurra Germany
Infectious Media
Innovation Interactive
InterCLICK
Invite Media
LucidMedia
MaxPoint Interactive
Media Innovation Group
Media6Degrees
MediaMath
Mediaplex
Mexad
Mixpo
Mpire
NetSeer Inc.
NextAction
OpenX Technologies
OpinMind
OwnerIQ, Inc.
Pennyweb, Inc. (DBA Ybrant Digital)
People Media, Inc
Pinnacle Dream Media
Pulse 360
Quantcast Corporation
QuinStreet, Inc.
Radius Marketing Inc.
Red Aril, Inc.
Redux Media Inc.
Reply! Inc.
ReTargeter
RichRelevance, Inc.
Rocket Fuel Inc.
Semantic Sugar, Inc.
ShareThis, Inc.
Sooth Software Corporation (dba AdBuyer.com)
Specific Media
Spongecell
Struq Limited
TellApart
Teracent Corporation
The Exchange Lab
Traffic Marketplace
Triggit
Turn
ValueClick International Ltd
ValueClick, Inc.
Veremedia
VivaKi
Xtend Global Media LTD
[X+1]

We tried approaching different people, including OpenX forums, third party freelance sites, etc. A consistent answer we received was, if the third party advertiser does not support the extra parameter in their ad code, there is no way to capture the clicks from their ads. We were puzzled at realizing that such a simple requirement might not be handled in OpenX.

Very interestingly, someone from OpenX Services wrote to me a few days after the last post was published, saying that they could solve this problem for us.

So I had written back to them asking for the next steps to be taken to proceed with this. I am yet to hear from them.

Meanwhile, I started thinking to myself, if someone at OpenX Services says that they can solve this for us, then definitely it is something that is possible with OpenX with some custom coding/fine tuning. As I started thinking more about the alternative ways of solving this, a very rudimentary solution came to my mind where I did the following steps:

1. Created an advertiser (lets call this A1), a campaign and a banner in which I posted the tag from the non-supported third party into it.
2. Created a publisher (lets call this P1) and set up a zone for this publisher. Linked the banner created in step 1 and generated the ad tag from Auro Ads for P1.
3. Created another advertiser (say A2), setup a campaign and a banner. In this banner, I posted the tag from P1 and set it to ‘OpenX’ as the HTML provider.
4. Created another publisher (say P2) and setup a zone for this publisher, linked the banner from A1 and generated the ad tag.
5. Posted the ad tag for P2 in a test page.

The ad correctly showed up from A1, but when I clicked it, the Auro Ads system did not capture the click.

So at this point, this issue is still not solved, but we are at least sure that there is a way to solve it – because the OpenX services team believes there is. So we are going to keep trying out alternative solutions and will provide an update on this.

There are quite a few good features announced, but all of them listed so far, appear to be related mainly to OpenX Market integration – not a bad idea though.

For those of who, who are not familiar with OpenX, it started as an independent open source community project and went through many name changes before it became OpenX. Around this time, it got good funding from venture capitalists and now they are trying to make the product better as well as make it revenue generating by using alternate ideas such as offering consulting services, a hosted version, etc.

In this version 2.8.4, some of the key non-OpenX market related features are:

• Easier upgrade options using a simpler navigation scheme
• New Inventory Setup Wizard, to help you easily setup and manage your advertisers and publishers

Some of the OpenX market related features are:

• Setting a minimum CPM above which ads can be served from the OpenX market. This will allow the system to serve ads from OpenX market, if it gives ads at a better CPM than the minimum CPM set in the system.
• Creating and managing campaigns for the ads served from OpenX market.
• Allowing OpenX market to serve the ads if there are blank ads shown.
• Easier view of the statistics collected from the ads served by OpenX market.

All these features appear to be very promising, but this release clearly shows the trend in which OpenX is progressing, ie. investing more and more of their time towards promoting the growth of the OpenX Market.

We have seen the pattern in the past on such projects, where when a open source project takes a deviation from its original core goal, a new fork version comes, which continues to go down the path of the original goal. Lets see how this one goes.

Two interesting things happened yesterday:

1. We upgraded to the latest version of OpenX (2.8.3)
2. We also moved our adserver to a new server.

Right after these changes, the statistics stopped getting captured.

We initially thought we had messed up something during the migration and so we tried to fix it by copying the database over again, clearing the cache file, etc. Still the statistics were not getting captured.

During this research, we also noticed that ‘Invocation Code’ link under Zones was having some issue (the drop down that usually shows Javascript/Iframe options had no options in it). So we were unable to get any ad code also. At this time, we started getting a feeling if something was wrong with the newest version of OpenX.

In order to isolate the issue, we took a brand new version of OpenX and installed it on a new server. We noticed that in this brand new installation also the Javascript/Iframe options was missing in the invocation code.

At this point, we strongly believed this has to do with the new version and so we are reverted back to the old version and immediately our statistics started working.

Based on these facts so far, we are now running on 2.8.2 itself – and we dont intend to upgrade to 2.8.3 unless we get to the bottom of the issue and identify the exact cause of the issue that troubled us a lot this week.

Will keep you updated on this.

We are looking for OpenX experts to help us with this. Please find below our requirements with the details of the issue. If you feel you could be of any assistance, please feel free to reply.

This is a very quick task for a OpenX expert as it should not take much time for an OpenX expert to solve this.

We have OpenX installed on one of our servers.

1. We have created a new advertiser, a new campaign under this advertiser and a new banner as ‘OpenX Generic HTML Banner’. The following is a sample code of this banner:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
var guruji_ad_client = “gu12345678″;
var guruji_ad_id = “123″;
var guruji_ad_type = “2″;
var guruji_ad_bgcolor = “FFFFFF”;
var guruji_ad_tcolor = “000000″;
var guruji_ad_dcolor = “000099″;
var guruji_ad_ucolor = “000000″;
var guruji_ad_keyword = “movies”;
var guruji_ad_width=”728″;
var guruji_ad_height=”90″;
var guruji_ad_language =”1″;
var guruji_ad_contentType =”3″;
var guruji_ad_open =”1″;
–>
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://adguru.guruji.com/scripts/show_ads.js”></script>

2. We are able to track the clicks for known providers, but are not able to track the click for this ‘unknown provider’ listed above. OpenX recommends using magic macros to solve this.

We are looking for an OpenX expert to help us with the solution to this.

The success of this task will result in clicks correctly captured in the OpenX statistics for this ad.

If you feel you are experienced in setting this up, please bid on this task. If you have any questions on this, please feel free to ask.

If you do not have previous experience with OpenX please do not bid.

For a person experienced with OpenX this should be a easy task, and we have many more such tasks in mind in the future as our ad serving is increasing on OpenX platform.

Regards,

Admin