Loving those ads.
Posted on July 12, 2007 by Tim
Filed Under Project Ninja |
Lets not beat around the bush - advertising banners annoy developers more than anyone. More often than not they intefer with the page load time and continually challenge our sense of humour when they expand, pop; or yes, sometimes even fizz.
That’s not to say we forget they pay our salaries and can indeed provide a valuable service to our users - particularly when they are appropriately targetted and capped - an area I believe interactive investor is already a leader in.
DoubleClick is currently our ad server of choice and it’s acquisition by Google will no doubt ensure it continues to be the number 1 choice for major online publishers and agencies. That said, I’ve been keeping a very close eye on OpenAds (previously ‘PHPAdsNew’) - an extremely capable open source package which claims to be in use on more sites than both DoubleClick and Accipiter. Not many big ones yet I assume.
I installed an early version on a friend’s site over a year ago - www.hedgeweek.com , during which time many millions of banners have been served and reported on across 50+ zones. He maintains campaigns via a web interface. The database backs itself up every night. It really is low maintenance.
In the case of a site serving millions of banners through DoubleClick, the potential saving and performance benefit by running in house on OpenAds is fairly significant. The only problem is, “do the agencies get it ?”
Tonight I installed the latest OpenAds 2.3 (beta). It’s feature packed and is testing great. In particular it supports an XML-RPC method of invocation, which may well provide a more reliable way of serving multiple ads on a page more efficiently.
I might just learn to love those ads again.
Next steps:
- Test on single area of www.iii.co.uk and measure performance / page load speed.
- Load test with realistic site traffic levels.
- If satisfactory, consider solution for new site development instead of DoubleClick.
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