Online Advertising
This week is the week where I try to set up online advertising for the web page. All of the other steps in the future of the web site involve attracting users, but if we do that without a way to pay for those users then we’re just digging ourselves into a hole. So before we add anything else, we need to put up advertising.
I’ve chosen to go with OpenX for an advertising solution, mostly because it is free and open source. I was originally going to just use Google AdSense, but OpenX supports both Google AdSense and its own advertising network. And, of course, there are already OpenX Drupal modules, OpenX and OpenX Manager, which will presumably integrate seamlessly with everything else I’ve done so far.
There is one choice that I have to make, which is to download an OpenX installation and put it up on ads.koreaittimes.com myself, or to just use a hosted OpenX solution. I signed up for the hosted solution yesterday evening and got an email acceptance this morning just in case, but I have yet to decide which is best for the site. The only difference seems to be that I’ll be receiving ads from an OpenX server if I use the hosted solution, which makes me wonder how fast the hosted OpenX servers are. Also, we’ll have to start paying if we serve more than 150 million ad impressions per month, which is a nice goal to reach for but something that isn’t going to happen next week.
