Websites need ads. It’s one of the things that make the internet go ’round. That and porn.

If a startup wants to have a free solution for serving ads, there has really only been one choice for many years, OpenX, formerly known as phpAdsNew. OpenX has been at Wikia for quite some time. After hitting some brick walls with scalability, having downtime/slowness issues, and getting frustrated with basic functionality that work without taking down the server, I decided it was time to try something new.

I looked into Google Ad Manager over the past few days. It seems like it can do the job, and last night I wrote all the code. Today I switched all of the wikia.com websites from OpenX for serving Spotlight Ads to Google Ad Manager.

Here are the compelling reasons I found for switching.

  • OpenX is crap — It is possible to write high scale web applications in PHP/Mysql. I’ve done it, multiple times. OpenX has not. Sorry for being a bit arrogant here, but I will happily engage an OpenX architect and question numerous design decisions. As an example: Logging impressions to a relational database in real time is a horrible idea. Horrible. It will never scale. Telling people that the right way to solve this problem is by logging on the app servers? Even worse.
  • Google’s infrastructure — Even if OpenX wasn’t horrible, I still don’t want to have to worry about buying servers, system administration time, and bandwith for my ad infrastructure. I put more faith in Google’s and Yahoo!’s infrastructure than anything a startup can build.
  • It’s easier to use — I found the interface and code setup far more intutive than OpenX. So have the 4 other people that I’ve been working with to load ads. They love how simple Google Ad Manager is. That being said, there are a couple of less-than-intuitive things with Google Ad Manager, so it wasn’t completely painless. Maybe Apple needs to come out with iAdManager? :)
  • It’s Free — Ok. Did you guys hear that? Free. Free hosting of the graphics. Free server infrastructure. Estimates are that this will save Wikia.com $5000 a month in bandwidth and servers.

    Is this the death of OpenX? No. There are still some things that Google Ad Manager can’t do. There is also a bunch of technical weirdos that think Google has too much power, so they will continue to use OpenX out of fear.

    However - Google just flexed their muscle, and they pulled off a great first product. Good work Google.

    And if someone knows how to short OpenX stock, let me know, ;-)