If you are a blogger or a mid-sized website who wants to monetize your traffic and manage your ads easily and with less hassle, the free open source company OpenX ’s announced OpenX Hosted is the solution for you.

OpenX Hosted, the hosted version (SaaS) of the company’s popular open source ad server that powers a community of more than 100,000 websites across the Internet, is now open for any publisher to sign up, after leaving beta testing since January 2008. Now you can start using it without an invitation and use the same software features found in the original OpenX Ad Server, which allows publishers to control their ad space.

Being SaaS, OpenX provides you OpenX Hosted, without the need to download and install software on your servers, thus eliminating the need for hosting complexities and charges. Moreover OpenX Hosted is free for websites with up to 25 million ad impressions each month. This represents more than 95% of OpenX publisher community of websites, according to OpenX .

As for websites with up to 40 million monthly ad impressions, monthly fee is US$215, with each additional 1M monthly ad impressions at US$20.00. While websites with up to 250 million monthly ad impressions are charged for US$1,800 monthly, with each additional 1M monthly ad impressions at US$17.50. At the same time, OpenX Ad Server remains free to download and host at your own servers (Self Hosted).

Like OpenX Ad Server, OpenX Hosted contains the same nice feature-set that enables publishers to manage their advertising campaigns across multiple direct advertisers and ad networks, prioritize and optimize their campaigns, and use sophisticated targeting tools based on criteria such as on visitor geography, keyword and website location. OpenX Hosted also enables publishers to maintain tight control over which advertisers are permitted to see their data and advertise to their users.

This move by OpenX represent a business model that cab be followed by open source vendors to monetize their products, make money from SaaS.

The other source of revenue for OpenX is OpenX Market (ALPHA), an online marketplace “where publishers can make their advertising space and inventory available to large numbers of buyers (including ad networks and agencies). Those buyers get the opportunity to bid for each impression, with the highest bidder displaying their ad if their bid beats a floor price set by the publisher.”

OpenX ad severs products are  translated into 25 languages, with Arabic being translated 26% and 68% remains, I encourage Arabic/English speakers to get involved in the OpenX community and help translate the rest of the software,.

OpenX was an evolution from PHPAdsNow, then renamed to OpenAds, in which I tested locally around 3 years ago, and since they received a multimillion dollar funding from Accel Partners, Index Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, the re-branded to OpenX.

I will test Open X Ad Server and OpenX Hosted in the coming month and a review will be published accordingly.

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