What service or software should I use to serve advertising on a site with about 120k monthly page views?
- by JasonBirch
I have a site that is generating about 120k monthly page views and is being hosted on a shared FreeBSD server where I have access to PHP and MySQL. I am using some custom PHP server-side scripts that give each of my ad networks (AdSense, Tribal Fusion, etc) an adjustable percentage of impressions in each of the ad positions on my pages.
I am looking for a better way of managing and measuring the delivery of these ads, and would also like to be able to take direct placements and provide statistics to the clients.
I am looking at options including OpenX self-hosted, OpenX community, and Google DoubleClick for Publishers Small Business (DFP), but am having difficulty determining which one will best meet my needs. They all seem to have pretty steep learning curves compared to my simple scripts.
What I have taken away so far as the benefit of self-hosting is that I don't have to pay for the service if I exceed a maximum number of ad impressions, while both OpenX Community and DFP have free impression limits. Of course, if I was doing those kind of numbers I'd need to upgrade my hosting account, but I'm not sure even at that point whether it would be cheaper to serve the ads myself than pay for a premium service.
Apart from this, I really need insights into what features differentiate these services, why I might want to choose one over another, and if there are any other competing products or service of the same quality that I should look into. Answers from webmasters who have used both (or all three) services and can talk to usability and ease of ad management would be highly appreciated.
