Competitors

Competitive landscape for banner management and delivery software is really crowded.

OpenX

Until the introduction of Google Ad Manager, OpenX was the unquestionable leader. Free, open source, versatile. Feeling the pressure, they responded by launching OpenX hosted solution, which greatly reduce maintainance burden for users.

Google Ad Manager

New player that seems almost destined to dominate the market.

Ad Manager is free to use, hosted solution. It also provides free hosting for media banners on Google's servers. Furthermore, it gives users an option to utilize unsold placements by displaying Google's stock, both rich media and of course AdSense (AdSense account is mandatory to use Ad Manager).

Pay-to-use solutions

There are plenty of commercial products, most of them quite expensive and target big-scale customers: smartadserver.com, advertpro.com, addeliverysolutions.com. There are some simple ones like AdButler (subscription-based, starts from $6/mo) or OIOPublisher.com ($49 to buy).

Ad networks

These are marketplaces, that bring together advertisers and publishers. Of course, they provide publisher with tools to manage banners delivery.

Some players: BuySellAds, AdBrite, RichMedia. You can find many more by googling for ad marketplace.

How we differentiate?

Such a crowded space validate the market but the question is - how we can earn our place under the sun? How our solution will be different from others, providing compelling reasons for potential customer to buy?

That's the question. ;) Stay tuned while we're looking for the answer.

Getting (new) customers

Seth Godin, on what you need to get new customers:

1. A group of possible customers you can identify and reach.
2. A group with a problem they want to solve using your solution.
3. A group with the desire and ability to spend money to solve that problem.

Getting started with Amazon CloudFront

Amazon does not provide rich tools for interacting with S3/CloudFront services. In fact, it barely provides any tools. Instead, they publish and document their API and let developers community to build the tools they want. Reminds me of Twitter.

There is big selection of tools/solutions available but it took me some time to find one that fits my needs.

The gem I found is s3cmd. This is a simple, command-line tool that supports nearly all Amazon S3 API functionality and recently got support for CloudFront APIs as well. Command-line is critical, since it allows to be used in batch jobs and be re-used from my own tools. It is also written in Python, language I prefer, which means it is easy for me to embed/extend/debug it.

Here is the gist of getting CloudFront distribution up and running:

$ s3cmd --configure # setup S3 keys on local machine
$ s3cmd mb s3://dou-static # create a bucket
$ s3cmd put -P images/logo-new.png s3://dou-static/images/ # upload a file
$ s3cmd cfcreate s3://dou-static/ # request new dist from CloudFront
# a couple of minutes for CloudFront to activate new dist
$ s3cmd cfinfo # Status: online
$ wget http://d15ewwxci4mze.cloudfront.net/images/logo-new.png # It works!

For more information refer to excellent s3cmd documentation.

The idea

There is a lot of software products that help manage advertising stock for websites. OpenX is probably most popular, Google introduced its own Ad Manager offering and of course there are many more.

We have been using OpenX to manage advertisting at developers.org.ua for more than 2 years and we are not very happy with it. For a start, it is big and complicated. Its complexity is the other side for its reach and features.

It is designed for sites which have many millons imporessions per month, where a lot of people involved (agencies, support, ad sites) and complex and flexible rule setup is really needed.

But most sites aren't that big and they would get along with a much simpler solution. At least, we would certainly do.

The other problem with OpenX is usability and performance. It doesn't serve the ads in the most efficient way possible which has direct impact on our users. We had to do lots of trickery to make sure the pages load quickly and slow loading ads do not irritate user.

I think there must be a better solution. Simpler to administer, efficient and unobtrusive for website's users. It won't have half as many features as OpenX/Google Ad manager but it might be just want small to medium size sites need. That is what we are going to build.