Finding an Ad Management System?

aagha asks: "I'm working for a very small, three-person startup in Athens, Greece (with a dwindling budget), trying to create the first real, full-featured tourism website for this country. While we have our home-grown Java-based Content Management System up and running and our site working fairly smoothly, we're having one heck of a time finding an ad management system to to work with our system. We have URL's which contain params to build our pages dynamically and we can't find a solution to work with our JSP's to serve ads targeted by category and or article. I know that I'm not the only person writing software for a JSP site (uhhh, or am I?). I'm curious to know what others have done to meet their advertisement serving needs."

Comments

tsarkon report pissing phirst poast

[Anonymous Coward]

The Future of SLASHDOT.

2002. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts." or posts that contain any rational insight are modded "troll."

2002. CmdrTaco married to a human female, reports are that she does not have 46 chromosomes, however. Fent does display tendency to retardation.

2002. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it.

2003. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God. (Taco suggested that in order to be "God," or his vision of God, Gates would have to be seen in a NAMBLA T-shirt. Luckily good taste prevails in favor of the old man image in glowing aura.)

2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity, well, not sex with men virginity, that's long since gone, and not sex with anime blow up dolls, this time, real sex.

2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0Beta6 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms. FreeBSD users are glad the insanity is dying.

2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again, even with constant Viagra therapy, it took this long. He complains, I can be ready to go again in five minutes if I was looking at a nude man, to the dyslexic Fent.

2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again, this time plugging Fent in the ass for a more manlike feel.

2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place. FreeBSD 9 is delivered in perfect working order in a coherent superior, commercially viable and useable fashion with real documentation, the same practice followed since inception. Linux lunatics, after the death of Cox, are still trying to perfect the Trident driver while ignoring the existence of the GeForce 9. Netcraft dies along with all the surveys they held on Microsoft and Linux servers are lost as well.

2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

2007. Box running FreeBSD for 6 years sets world record for Unix uptime on consumer hardware.

2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time without thinking of men. He has dawned on the extra sexual pick me up for his twisted mind, small children.

A long long fucking time from now. Malda, fat, poverty-stricken, unrespected and unremembered and living in an appliance box in Michigan with a pickle jar for a toilet comes to a series of epiphanies. The 8.3 file system that made him truncate his nick to an 8 letter series of characters has long been forgotten, and he finally realizes he looks like a fag using it. He also realizes that men's asses look like tacos, especially with the beef pouring out and that his name sounds more like Commander of Ass, since one can command asses because the belong potentially to sentient or living things, it is difficult to command inanimate objects such as food , so one can only conclude he was commanding ass.

He also realized his site was a lame, fad, he sold out, he needed to refactor his shit code and never did it. He also realized that communites such as Fark don't have this complete asshole running it with gay lameness and compression filters and lame IP blocking bullshit and cheating, pissing and whining and barely anyone trolls it.

We hate you, Fucking Robbie;

he remembers as reams of pages of trolls cry for his expulsion. He also realizes he cant have a computer anymore because he hates the RIAA and MPAA but ran out and gave George Lucas and other shit media companies tons of money to ruin the laws in favor of the omnicorps. He also realizes his socialist and fascist fucking moderation system squelched all the real comments out of view. He also realizes that a full time crew "working" at Slashdot did a shittier job than anyone thought possible.

He also realized he didn't do SHIT for subscribers and punished them as he would anyone else with page limits, IP blocks, compression and lameness filters. He also realizes Signal 11 is a better man than him and that he is a fucking loser for throwing out S11. He realizes despite being an Open Source advocated, his horrible, unusable unreadable pile of shit called Slashcode was one of the worst projects ever. He realized that retarded journalists are better at reporting the news than Slashdot, that Slashdot news was often inaccurate and unverified.

He also realizes that Aprils fools jokes were really stupid and everyone hated them. He realizes bitchslapping, banner ads, ^H and ^W to show deletion and moderation $rtbl are fucking gay and lame. He realizes this all in a flash as the totalitarian regime he was a small part of constructing (through teaching mobocracy, populism as a rule, hordes of untrained and meritless swarms of people allowed to crucify those who would oppose the thinking of the state) determines his body is a waste of government resources and that he needs to be expelled to a concentration area of the worthless. I figures he would have been the first resident in the camp of the beings deemed worthless to society, along with Jon Katz, but the government, even as a fascist totalitarian regime takes a while to getting around to things.

Re:tsarkon report pissing phirst poast

[Anonymous Coward]

w00T!

Please mod parent up.

Params - noooooooo

[DrSkwid]

not search engine friendly

spider :
http://website/makepage.x?page=1 : ok
http://website/makepage.x?page=2 : skipping - repeat
http://website/makepage.x?page=3 : skipping - repeat
http://website/makepage.x?page=4 : skipping - repeat

Re:Params - noooooooo

[Sentry21]

This is what my website does, and Google indexes it fine.

--Dan

maybee

[Anonymous Coward]

SELECT * FROM ads_live WHERE page_id=[page_ref] OR cat_id=[category_ref];

joined with the ads table of course ;)

try looking at web pages

[DrSkwid]

mostly people seem to use javascript these days

That way the pages themselves can be cached / static and the ads rotate themselves.
This also helps with tracking as the script that generates the javascript can log the ads.

Generating traffic via search engines is important.
Your URL scheme is an important consideration.
I use mod_perl to take the url and set environment variables which then tell the page generation code which page to generate. Similar to having a query string but my pages are called comething nice like

http://www.thebigchoice.com/Graduate_Jobs/Teleco mm unications/Nutts_Corner/

rather than

http://www.thebigchoice.com/jobsearch.php?discip li neID=5&region=7

Re:try looking at web pages

[Sentry21]

Another way to do it is IFRAMEs. They're not entirely cross-browser, of course, but you can put non-IFRAME code into the ... area as a backup. That way, you can just call an external script or whatever, and rotate that separately.

I have no idea if this helps you at all, but hey.

--Dan

What ever you find

[Anonymous Coward]

*please* make sure that the ad management system silently manages to remove popups, and limits all animations to at most one iteration. May hurt your advertising, but will please your users.

Re:What ever you find

[Xunker]

Silent remove popups, my good chum, and you silently lose your advertisers. And as the advertisers go, so does the project.

This is the inherent problem with Free-as-in-Beer projects -- how the heck do you pay for them? After all, even if you work for free, bandwidth still costs money at the very least. Ideals are one thing, and to be respected, but so is the drive to eat and pay the rent.

Popups do suck, and I do hate 'em, but you hafta understand that for a lot of people they are one of the only game in town to finance our little ideas. Advertising execs may not understand that POPUPS DO NOT WORK, but that doesn't stop them from shelling out untold millions on them.

However, there is the concept of a happy media. On my multi-million-hits-a-month site (non-linkage intentional), the idea is simple -- I only get paid for for each IP unique view once every 24 hours. My solution? Only show that IP an ad once every 24 hours. Yes, that means that the users have to close a popup the first time they visit me a day, but it also means that they only have to close that popup once a day. Not a perfect solution, but I haven't yet found a better alternative yet (except for these textads things, they seem to be picking up as of late)

Re:What ever you find

[Anonymous Coward]

I think ad people are starting to realize they don't work. I'm an www media buyer, and I don't buy them, and some of my clients have been requesting that we don't use them. The tide is turning against popups.

hmmm so far they're missing the point

[foniksonik]

This fine chap is looking for ad rotation code which uses demographics, personalized content info, region targeting, etc. to SERVE ADS to his viewers.

So try to stick to providing details on OSS initiatives in Java or similar OO languages which does the forementioned.

Personally, I'm not sure if I want businesses to have really good OSS Ad serving software but if you're gonna do it at least do it OSS so the rest of us can put together great commerce sites as well.

OASIS

[bencc99]

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but OASIS is an incredibly flexible ad management system. I've not used it in production (management decision), but in testing it showed itself up fairly well. It's fast, reliable, and has some excellent ad/sponsor management features.

Re:OASIS

[realkiwi]

jsp is not php. Badly programmed jsp won't work. Badly programmed php will work on the developers machine and crash everybody elses browser...

OASIS won't do. The guy is looking for a jsp solution.

Re:OASIS

[aagha]

We're finding ourselves in a position where PHP seems to be the only solution out there--something I find amazingly bizarre.

JSP _is_ the way we want to go, but I don't see ANY alternatives out there as of yet(hmmm, new Sourceforge project?).

We've looked at solutions like AdJuggler.com, adservingsolutions.com, but no one but no one can handle dynamic pages!

Re:OASIS

[realkiwi]

If OASIS is good it should be reasonably easy to take it appart and recode in JSP.

And put in Postgresql as the backend of course =:-D

Re:OASIS

[aagha]

I was hoping for a solution I can roll out with our launch in a week. You think I'll be able to get that done in a week? ;-)

Re:OASIS

[realkiwi]

Not this week!

I have my first full month of work in quite a while...

Re:OASIS

[Yuan-Lung]

When I built the ad management system on our JSP community site, we were quiet pressed for time, so I just went for the simplest solution I could think of.

I threw the list of banners into a table, along with the chance of showing and statistics, then I insert into the pages a javascript that randomly pulls a banner according to that statistics each time a banner is displayed. I tracked the banner display counts as they are requested. For tracking the clicking, I just used a JSP page to forward the users after they click on the banner before sending them to the real URL.

I was able to implement and test this in a few days... Or is this not what you were looking for?

Re:OASIS

[aagha]

This is indeed an option I've considered and one we might implement if we get extremely pressed for time and need to have a system up--right now, we have the luxury of a couple of weeks; we can launch (in Beta) without a system in place.

However, long-run, we need a much more robust solution where we can target at the category and a content level, gather stats, create campaigns, experation dates, etc...

I'm hesitant to introduce PHP (most systems seem to be running MySQL) as we're JSP on Postgres, and I don't wan't to add 2 more (big) things to have to worry about. But seeing how all the robust solutions out there ARE in PHP, I'm starting to become curious how JSP and PHP would cohabitate.

Re:OASIS

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly can PHP crash a browser? It pretty much just outputs HTML code, as JSP does..

phpAdsNew

[deicide]

phpAdsNew (http://www.phpadsnew.com) is very feature-rich and fast. It also can serve banners over XML-RPC so you could hook it up to your JSP CMS.

It supports keywords/categories, zones, all banner sizes (including popups and floating layers), geotargetting, etc.

use engage

[josepha48]

You could try engage softwares admanager. We used it at a company I worked at and it was okay. It had a system to enter in the ad and then there were ad calls and an API so that we could extend it. We had a dynamic system as well so this worked okay. Also you could use doubleclick like many smaller companies do. It depends on how many ads you want to display.

Url is here -> http://www.engage.com/uk/products/admanager/defaul t.htm

Re:use engage

[aagha]

I've filled in DoubleClick's form for a sales rep to contact me two times. They've not. Their sales guys must be soooo busy, that they have to turn away busines...

Re:use engage

[josepha48]

which is why I suggested engage...

Alternately you could build your own system. You need a place to store the images, a place to store the html templates for the images / ads, and then a template processor. Also a counter. The web logs will actually tell you most of the information if you use apache. Apache logs will tell you the image that was loaded and the page requests. You'd have to then parse them.

Seriously look at engage.com and see if there is soimething there that you could use.

Great!

[tomblackwell]

It's a shame that it isn't .JSP based, or it might be of some relevance here.

Re:Great!

[aagha]

XML-RPC _is_ an interesting option though! I've posted on the "General" forum for the phpAdsNew project on Sourceforge, and there's a discussion going on thre (see subject: JSP and XML).

Check this site...

[Ron Harwood]

There are listings for 5 different apps - some commercial, some free...

http://www.hotscripts.com/Java/JSP_and_Servlets/Ad _Management/

Re:Check this site...

[aagha]

I've seen this, thx.

AdJuggler - Spoke to sales and tech reps; Can't do what we need; can't handle dynamic pages.

AdServer Solutions - I asked the guy if they can handle our situation. He said, "We can do that." I asked for documentation. He said, "We have alot of people that do this. We do not have any information laid out but will provide this when you are using it". Uhhh, I don't think so...

AdRevolver -- Talking to them right now. They DO seem to be willing to provide the effort to try to make this work, but things are in early stage right now.

adcycle

[sagi]

We've been using adcycle for few years now with large number of sites/campaigns.

It is not free, but the price is not too high and most(all?) of the code comes with source.

It also comes with optional daemon that really helps to reduce load from the database.

Re:adcycle

[aagha]

AdCycle is interesting indeed, but poses the dual problem of being PHP based and running on MySql. I'm willing to take on this extra burden if I _have_ to, but first need to know if it can solve my problem.

On the Adcycle.com forum, I posted [Adcycle.com forum] my specific problem a few days back and it seems to be the only posting up there without a single reply.

Until I know Adcycle can handle an issue like this, I don't have the cycles needed to research it more in depth.

Thanks for the suggestion though!