I was only wondering about those because the price of the plugin seemed so cheap. I was afraid that the low price of the plugin + the tokens = pay per use. In a situation like that I’d rather see a commission per ad.

The trouble with openads is that it is overkill for most people, as you pointed out. For very high traffic blogs (higher than this one for example) it may be worth it, or for those who want huge flexibility in terms of ad zones (OIO only has one banner ad zone for now), but for the rest, not worth it.

I’ve also seen people give up on openads because its started to not play nice with their server, so shared hosts may be a problem.

The functionality in Openads though is INSANE and took me days to learn! It was obviously designed for massively high traffic por—uhh, umm… “adult oriented” sites. In large part many of its features are simply overkill for blogs, though they are fun to use, and its versatility does make advertising space on a blog far more valuable (there’s something to be said for giving an advertiser the ability to dump 100 ads in your advertising zone and have them all rotated proportionately with just a few clicks).

I would be careful not to bite off more than you can chew right now, and maybe focus instead on developing stats for ads Openads can’t track, such as link and RSS ads.

JC actually asked me today if OIO could do stats tracking, and the author of dailyblogtips has said that he’d like to see this kind of functionality in OIO, before he would consider using it. Maybe you should write a post on how you integrated the two, they might like to see it!

I’ll actually be starting tomorrow on a tracker module (I was going to do full-blown analytics, but ad stats is more important initially) to emulate at least some of the openads functionality, without having to install openads. Then we can start throwing in advertiser stats reports to people.

I think that the combo idea is still a good one, since I’m pretty sure OpenAds will provide more functionality than I could in the short-term. Feel free to pitch in with any ideas you have for a native OIO stats tracker module though (level of detail etc)!

Personally, this allows me to set premium (higher than average) prices for ad space because I’m offering a lot more than just ad placement, but also significant editorial control over how campaigns are run on the site. In addition, I have OIOPublisher manage the 125×125 ads and offer these spaces at discount (lower than average) prices since it offers less statistics and editorial control. There’s literally something for everyone here.

I really enjoy this solution because the combination of Openads and OIOPublisher allows me to test and try out all kinds of advertising networks and determine which marketplaces will prove to be the most lucrative for me (and therefore worth my time.)

Now, if I can just bring more traffic to my site dammit to hell, then I might actually be able to quit my job someday.

He’s building a great plugin and a promising new marketplace and I wish him lots of success with it. I certainly hope 2008 will be a banner year for him (and for those of us who use the plugin too.)

Sending you an email now mate

admin[at]oiopublisher[dot]com

Yeah Simon has clearly put a lot of time and effort into this plugin you can see that , i bought it yesterday and hes already got out an updated version so hes working on it day in day out.

Im still trying to install this bad boy 100% though Simon, i tried sending you a message via your personal blog contact form, don’t know if you replied and it went into my spam filter because i just deleted over 700 emails from there which someone kindly spammed me with today

Could i get an email to get in touch with you or speak over an instant messenger or anything?!

Thanks
Jord

In my opinion $37 is a fair price. Some people tell me it is under-priced, others say it should be free. It really depends on the blogger I suppose.

It also largely depends on whether you look at it as a “plugin” or something more. Even if someone copied all the code, and gave it away for free (as I have done for the past few months lol), it wouldn’t matter because they wouldn’t have the infrastructure built around it to make the most use of it.

I haven’t seen anyone comment on anything beyond the plugin, which tells me 2 things. First, my documentation sucks (working on that at the moment, with a virtual tour). Second, that users who have looked at the site have failed to look beyond the fact that there is a plugin that offers direct ad sales.

Direct ad sales are one part of the equation sure, but believe it or not I’m thinking about the little guy more than you realise. One of my early 2008 projects is to build an ad network module, that actually scans the plugin for open ad slots, and fills them for you automatically.

So you see, replicating the plugin would do no good in the long run, because the “little guy” will not make much from direct sales much of the time. But they could make some nice revenue from a “filler” ad-network, to compliment direct sales.

I could tell you a lot more about what OIOpublisher really does that you haven’t spotted yet, but instead I urge you all to wait until I have the virtual walkthrough completed – it will lay out everything step by step.

And finally, relating to what I said earlier, I do want to have some kind of Christmas offer going, maybe in conjunction with JC, maybe with other bloggers (depends on who makes the offer). I might even swing it so you can grab a free copy for a limited time.

Hopefully you’ll be in agreement there.