Ask HN: Shall I run my own adserver?

5 points by trienthusiast 11 years ago | 13 comments

Hello,

at the present time, advertising on my site is managed by a company that sells ads to relevant companies then serves them on my site, filling the remaining inventory with other ad networks.

At this time, they do the selling and the serving. I receive a monthly check which is the ad sales minus their commission (50%), minus serving costs.

There is no reporting, I never get any other detail other than the final amount.

Because of this - I would like to start moving to my own adserver (bonus if I don't need to physically host it myself) and just plug the ads that they sell.

How complicated is it? Worth the effort in your opinion, counting that I don't want to do any selling myself ?

Also, a big chunk of revenue is lost because they don't do responsive ads. All ads are sold on a desktop pageview basis and I know nowadays you can place some kind of placeholder and it will be rendered with a properly sized ad depending on the resolution.

Am i getting into a lot of trouble for wanting to do this on my own?

jeffmould 11 years ago |

First, a 50% commission rate seems a bit high if that does not even include serving costs.

The biggest question is will they sell the ad space for you and allow you to serve the ads yourself? Even still, this only reduces your serving costs while you still would be paying the commission, which to me seems like the higher of the two costs.

To answer your question about handling the serving of ads yourself, there are several options out there. Probably one of the best known for a managed solution is OpenX (http://openx.com). On the other hand there is Revive Adserver (http://revive-adserver.com) which is self-hosted and is actually the open source version of OpenX.

One caveat of running your own server though will be that you are responsible for your own inventory on the site. You can always fill any remaining inventory with Google Adsense or similar though. Long-story short, I would say unless you have substantial traffic to your site and are making significant money through ads on your site it is most likely not worth the hassle. If, on the other hand, your site has high enough traffic and your current ads are well targeted and have a high action rate for the advertiser you may be able to start selling your own ad space or find a better ad provider with better terms.

trienthusiast 11 years ago | |

Hey - thanks for the answer.

We do receive approximately 1M pageviews a month - with usually 2-3 ads per page.

The company who does the selling now has a sales funnel that we cannot match. Close relationships to big companies to whom they sell very relevant campaigns.

This said, we make approximately $2/3,000 per month with advertising.

I believe it's really small. They say it's because half of the pageviews are on mobile so many of their ads don't show.

Even this considered, I am growing tired of having that revenue amount as my only benchmark. I have been asking for detailed reporting for months and have not received any...

Regarding the choice - why no DFP? It seems to be the easiest one.

Dolimiter 11 years ago | | |

I presume that the content on your website is somewhat NSFW, otherwise you would be using Google Adsense or media.net to server the adverts. They give full reports, pay well, and in my experience pay higher for mobile browsers.

You say that they send you a cheque, with no breakdown of figures. This seems almost unbelievable to me.

Gustomaximus 11 years ago |

I would get some detailed reporting. Perhaps try a few alternate solutions on a couple of pages to see how they compare. A 50% commissions seems steep and you should probably implement some internal tagging or event monitoring so you can double check counts.

Overall I'd be inclined to try alternate plugin solutions over running your own server as it come with time management and generally businesses (I can know your so take it with a pinch of salt) are best spend specialising on what they do. If you want some direct cash you can always try to sell some page takeover or other sponsored events if requested.

trienthusiast 11 years ago | |

the idea of internal tagging to start having a better idea of impressions is good.

I'll have our developer work on it.

The problem here is that the company we work with has access to the big names in the industry. Having their ad campaigns on our sites actually adds credibility to the sites themselves.

But I might start looking into cutting my middleman and going to the advertisers directly.

skiltz 11 years ago |

I would run all the Ads through DFP so you can then track performance. https://www.google.com/dfp - Its really easy to setup. You can then also run adsense for any outstanding inventory you're not using.

cmdrfred 11 years ago |

I have also considered this. It allows you for a lot more freedom and control.