Professional Ad Serving for your site at no cost

[Starrfire Price]

Just a quick tip for those Creators who wish to use a professional and stable ad serving program to start promoting your own in-house rotation ads. I think this is a great addition to help with monetizing your site, alongside of the Ning Ads, which are coming out soon.

I use openx for my ad serving, I have a high traffic site but the rotation service is free. I've tested the performance of openx for about 6 months and they are both stable and reliable for ad serving.

The free version has more than enough options to more than adequately run a complete in-house ad serving program and it's as easy as copy/paste of code into your text boxes to get it up and running with ads. I sell ads that are anywhere from 445x75 all the way to 955x95 in size. A quick note for the code I use on my site, I use the Iframe choice for the code selection as it works the best in the text boxes (from my experience).

I've seen many posts on Ning relating to ad serving programs so I thought I would add this information as well to hopefully be of help to someone else who wishes to further monetize their sites through selling ad space. You can also easily run Google Adsense as well within the openx rotation.

Here's the link to the Openx page, the on-ramp version is free and like I said, more than adequate for ad rotation needs.

Also, here's the link to their how to section for the on-ramp service, it supplies all the needed information for setting up your ads and implementing them on your site.

I hope this is helpful to some of you who are wishing to sell in-house ads on their sites.

[BossChicks.com]

thanks for sharing.

[Starrfire Price]

You're very welcome!

[Kris]

we use google and and it's FREE too

www.google.com/dfp/sb

[Starrfire Price]

I have a Google DFP small business account as well, I just haven't used their service, so I couldn't really give information about it. Thanks for the info Kris!

[soaringeagle]

i posted a discusion about that cause i wanted to start using it but got too confused by the setup so..still not using that even tho i git the account

[Susan Daniels]

Google confuses me as well! Although they have been updating all their information and programs. I would like to use a rotator so will check out the Google AND OpenX. Whichever is easiest and fastest to do - wins. 

[Clark P]

We use DFP Small Business as well.  It's free and FAST.  Fairly steep learning curve, but lots of tutorials available.  Combined with isocket.com for direct ad sales, it makes a robust combination.

[American Energy]

I use to use openx, but it became too error prone and unreliable. Maybe they have cleared it up recently.

[Starrfire Price]

My site has a very heavy traffic load and it's been very stable and reliable for me. I did host the openx platform on my VPS but with my traffic load I had issues w/ it using too many server resources.

[Gerry Regan]

Starrfire, thank you for this. I find it all quite confusing. So you are able to sell your own ad inventory direct to marketers and serve ads that either they provide or you might create for them. OpenX OnRamp doesn't limit you to merely serving ad network's inventories? Might I see you site in action?

[Starrfire Price]

Hi Gerry, I'm glad it was helpful! Yes, I sell my own inventory via my advertising site - I do offer ad creation or they can upload their own ad image via my site. OpenX allows you to serve your own ad inventory or any type of ad inventory. Here's my site link which shows the ads I currently run on my site (Left Skyscraper, Right Skyscraper, Top/Bottom Leaderboard, Full site exposure Right Column Ad, Front page spotlight feature & banner). I hope this helps a little and if you have any additional questions please don't hesitate to let me know.

[Gerry Regan]

Starrfire, do you use OpenX's free version, now called OpenX OnRamp?

if so, do you have a technology consultant handling that for you? It seems a bit daunting. How might you recommend going about implementation? Ger