Frequently Asked Questions - OpenX Market

What is OpenX Market?

OpenX Market is a service that helps place ads on your sites to make you more money. It uses a real-time auction of hundreds of ad buyers to get the highest paying ad for each of your ad impressions.

How do I participate in OpenX Market?

OpenX Market is fully integrated with the OpenX Enterprise and OpenX Community ad servers. You can participate in three ways.

How do I view OpenX Market statistics?

OpenX Market statistics will be included into your regular ad serving statistics in the Statistics tab. You will be able to see OpenX Market statistics under the Advertisers & Campaigns section and the Websites & Zones section.

Specifically, OpenX Market will appear as an advertiser and it will display the following as its campaigns:

• The campaigns you created to exclusively serve OpenX Market ads.
• OpenX Market - Opted In Campaigns. This is a special campaign that includes all ads served by OpenX Market to opted in campaigns (when OpenX Market exceeded the floor price of the campaign).
• OpenX Market - Zone Default Ads. This is a special campaign that includes all ads served by OpenX Market to zones that would otherwise have served blanks.

For OpenX Enterprise, statistics under "OpenX Market - Opted In Campaigns" and "OpenX Market - Zone Default Ads" will be grouped by pairings of advertiser and ad size.

For OpenX Community, statistics under these two special campaigns will be grouped only by ad size.

How do I get paid by OpenX Market?

You will automatically be paid by OpenX each month your OpenX Market balance is greater than $100 USD. Your payment will be mailed within 45 days after the end of the month.

Prior to receiving your first payment, you must provide your payment information. To do this, go to the My Account tab and click on OpenX Market in the left hand section (if you are using OpenX Community Download, you must be working as the Administrator account). Then click on Payment Information to update your payment details and click on Tax Information to download the proper tax form.

In OpenX Market, advertisers make CPM-based bids in real-time auctions for every ad impression that you make available to the Market. You will earn revenue from OpenX Market every time the result of an auction exceeds the floor price you specify. You can set a different floor price for each campaign and OpenX Market will only serve an ad when it beats the floor price of the campaign that would otherwise serve that ad. By setting floor prices equal to the rates you already receive for your campaigns' ads, you ensure that you will always receive a revenue uplift from the Market. The best way to determine how much you can earn through OpenX Market is to start using it on a few campaigns. There is no cost to using OpenX Market and all it takes is a single click to opt in a campaign.

At the end of each month, if your OpenX Market revenue exceeds the payment threshold of $100 USD, OpenX will process the amount you've earned and send you a payment within 45 days of the end of the month. Before your first payment is sent, you must submit your payment information and tax information to OpenX. You can provide your payment information at My Account > OpenX Market > Payment Information. You can provide tax information at My Account > OpenX Market > Tax Information. If you are using OpenX Download, these two screens are only accessible to the Administrator account.

OpenX will send each payment as a check to the address specified in your payment information. If instead you wish to receive payments via PayPal, please send an email to finance@openx.org with a valid PayPal email address.

We charge a commission of 15% for successful auctions where ads are delivered through the market. For auctions with a value less than 7c CPM the commission is a fixed rate of 2c CPM.

There is no charge for making your ad space available on the OpenX Market, or for bidding on inventory.

The OpenX Market is a place for publishers to sell inventory to ad networks and advertisers; we aim to provide the best conditions for publishers, advertisers and ad networks of all sizes to buy and sell inventory at full and fair value.

By allowing OpenX Market bids and setting a minimum floor price for a particular campaign, you control whether impressions for that campaign can be replaced by higher value impressions from the OpenX Market.

Within the OpenX Market the floor price determines the price that a buyer must beat in order for their ad to be displayed on your website.

You can set a different floor price for each ad campaigns. By setting a floor price higher than the eCPM for your campaign you can increase your ad revenue.

The OpenX Market can help increase your ad revenue on any inventory you make available to the market. As such, it makes sense to enable it on as much inventory as possible.

The only risk is that the market will fill so much inventory that lower value direct advertising contracts don’t get a chance to deliver. To avoid this we recommend you set an appropriately high floor price for these campaigns.

If you find direct ad sales are not being delivered you may wish to disable the OpenX Market for these campaigns.

The OpenX Market is a source of advertising and ad revenue. It is intended to complement your existing advertising in a way which increases your overall ad revenue, rather than replace it.

You will need at least one ad campaign in order for the OpenX Market to operate.

It is possible that all your inventory will be delivered by the OpenX Market. This will happen if the market always beats the floor price for every impression that you make available.

OpenX provides filters you can use to control what advertising appears on your site, enabling you to block a particular category or banner type.

If you need to block a specific advertiser please contact us about this.

You can use the same filters to block particular kinds of ads e.g. expandable or flash.

Yes, you can specify the categories and types of ads that can be shown (e.g. no adult content, or no video ads).

To do this go to Inventory->Websites and click on a website name. When viewing the website properties, there will be an OpenX Market tab to the right of the properties and user access tab.

Click on the OpenX Market tab to edit the options available for specifying banner categories, banner types, and other such options.

The more information advertisers have on the inventory they bid on, the better placed they are to offer fair value for it. For that reason, OpenX aims to give advertisers and ad networks the opportunity to bid for inventory on the broadest set of criteria available. We do this by making the Market open, so that 3rd party data providers (e.g. demographic, geolocation) can supplement the information about websites and users that we provide advertisers and ad networks with their own data, giving them greater targeting options.

Publishers will not be able to bid on URL, however, so there is no danger the market will cannibalise direct ad sales.

At this stage, it is possible for a limited number of buyers to participate in the OpenX Market.

We are looking to make it possible for any publisher and advertiser to buy direct from the OpenX Market in the future by developing a new UI, in early 2009. Until then, if you're interested in buying through the OpenX Market, fill in this form.

Ad networks allow advertisers to submit creatives at a certain price, and publishers to accept them at that rate.

The OpenX Market is similar to some ad exchanges, those that allow real-time bidding on ad inventory.

However, unlike the main ad exchanges, the OpenX Market has been built from the ground up as a place for advertisers to buy quality inventory on niche sites. It is not a dumping ground for inventory that ad networks are unable to fill.

The OpenX Market auction is a CPM auction, so that you are guaranteed to beat a floor price and are not at risk of losing inventory on ineffective advertisers. The system's transparency ensures that any available inventory is sold at a fair price dictated solely by the market.

The OpenX Market allows publishers who fill 100% of their inventory to:
• Check the market value of site inventory
• Sell their inventory at a higher price via the market when possible
• Buy additional inventory to sell on to their direct advertisers