OpenX – Is this company blowing the huge opportunity they have?

We were very excited at BigOven.com the day we switched out all the ad serving from hardcoding one specific ad network (Google AdSense) to the ad-server OpenX (www.openx.org).  Its promise is that it allows “virtualization” of your ads, letting you work with multiple ad networks, and even sell direct. 

Setting it up only took a morning’s worth of work.  And I’m happy to report that it’s working properly from the consumer’s side, which is job #1.  Job#2?  Serve the publisher and advertiser extremely well, with great uptime, performance, and ease.  And it’s there that they are failing miserably.

Initial impressions were that this company has a HUGE opportunity to monetize the vast array of smaller publishers and amass the best data in the industry.  (DoubleClick’s DART server, another player in the space, is too expensive for mid-sized companies and is now owned by Google.  Ideally, publishers like us would like a Switzerland-type neutral entity serving our ads.)  Imagine if you could build a huge stock-market where buyers and sellers can market their ad and ad inventory? 

While OpenX does a decent job of actually rendering the ads, with good performance, once loaded into the system, they are really, really pooching the ball in the following areas, on a Twitter-like scale:

• Their UI to configure new campaigns is a mess.  It easily takes twice as many clicks as it should to do the most intuitive things (like set up a new advertiser or pause their campaign).
• Their reporting operational ability BLOWS, and I mean BLOWS.  More often than not, when we want to run a report, to, say, proactively inform a direct advertiser how well their campaign is working (which is what I’m trying to do right now), we’re met with a screen like the one below.

Their forums are becoming littered with posts like “100% performance slowdown since new update”, and other nasty postings that I now I cannot access to cite more examples because their site is down.

Come on, OpenX!  Fix your stuff.  Performance, and operational excellence, are two important features without which you cannot succeed.

 

Comments

[bill]

Do they have a robust API?

It seems that there is an opportunity for 3rd-party vendors to build reporting & analytic/campaign UI on top of openX.

I really hope OpenX can get their act together -- we need a strong player serving the SMB market, and not let Google monopolize.