Why I switched from OpenX to Google Doub...

Why would I do such a thing??!

Pretty straightforward really – I’m sorry to say this about OpenX because I really did like them for a number of years. Lately, they’re just shit. Yup, completely and utterly shit.

Ever since the name change to OpenX they’ve been going downhill, and I think nearly everyone in the community will agree with me – including some of their very own (former) developers.

Riddled with vulnerabilities, slow and non-required code and other problems we’ve probably all experienced with it. Not to mention no automatic optimization of your ad zones.

This past week, the final straw was picked. My OpenX installation was hacked, AFTER I had applied the latest security fix to it. Talking around to buddies, this happened to a number of people as well. I couldn’t believe it. Of course, I was venting my frustrations to one of my buddies and he told me he had recently switched from OpenX to Google DFP for the very same reasons.

I hadn’t even heard of Google DFP at the time. So, I went over to their site, logged in and got started creating my placements (websites), ad units (ad zones) and my orders (advertisers).

All I have to say is – WOW. It’s actually pretty cool. I remember the first times I was using OpenX it was quite complicated and difficult to understand how to setup the campaigns and the advertisers and ad units. Not so with DFP, just a few minutes of clicking and I figured it out.

Let’s take a look at the process for Google DFP versus OpenX shall we?

Google DFP Process:

1. Login using your existing Google or Google Applications account.
2. Click Inventory, Click Placements
3. Create a placement (eg. Sitename.com-Sidebar)
4. Click Ad Units
5. Create Ad Unit (eg. Sitename.com-Sidebar-Left-125×125)
6. Click Orders
7. Click New Order and add your advertiser, save it, then upload your image or html for the ad.
8. Click Inventory
9. Click ‘Generate Tags’ and copy the code to your page.
10. Wait 10-30 Minutes for Ads to Appear. You’re Done.

OpenX Process:

1. Buy a Domain name for OpenX
2. Buy Server Space for OpenX
3. Create OpenX Database
4. Install OpenX
5. Setup and Configure OpenX  (gfl if on windows hosting by the by)
6. Secure OpenX on your server.
7. Ensure Maintanance Mode is setup for OpenX so your ads will eventually display.
8. Now you can start setting up your ads.
9. First Click Inventory, Then click Websites & Zones
10. Add your website to OpenX
11. Add zones to your website
12. Now click back to Advertisers & Campaigns
13. Add an Advertiser
14. Add a Campaign to your new advertiser
15. Add some banners to your advertisers campaign
16. Set the zones in which your ads will appear  in banner configuration
17. Go back to Websites and Zones
18. Find your website and Zone
19. Click on it, then go to the fourth tab ‘invocation code’
20. Generate your invocation code
21. Go and paste it into your site along with any other relevant code
22. 10-60 minutes later your ads should start appearing.

As you can see OpenX requires a lot more clicks, typing and setup to get your ads and advertisers into the system. Nearly double in-fact. And it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten something here.

With Google DFP it’s actually much easier. Far fewer clicks are required and the added benefit that you can have it fall back to traditional Adsense ads if your network or in-house ads aren’t converting. As far as I understand their documentation the fallback will happen automatically if you select Adsense fallback when creating your ads.

There is one kind of major gotcha that I noticed thought. Due to Adsense terms and conditions, if you have more than 3 ad units on a page no ads will display, even if it’s just fallback to Adsense. Not too big of a deal but still something to note. I had to turn off Adsense fallback for all of my ads except one on the page and then all ads were displaying.

Bottom Line – Google DFP is quicker, easier, and probably far more secure than OpenX to use for your advertising delivery throughout your network. The only problems I’m having with it is the fact that it does sometimes crash Firefox or IE, but I haven’t had any problems with Chrome yet. I do wish they’d make a nice desktop application like they have for Adwords, but I’m sure that’s coming down the pipe.  One other thing I noticed is stats seem to take a long time to show up. As of this writing I’ve had DFP setup for two weeks and I still have no data available to create a report. I’m sure they’re still working out the last bugs in the system so this should be fixed soon.

Anyone else using DFP? What are your thoughts? Have you also migrated from OpenX? Let me know in the comments, I’m interested what others think of Google DFP vs OpenX.

Popularity: 100% [?]

The worst mistake any affiliate can (and...

Get cocky.

Yup. I said it. And on top of that I also admit that it happened to me.

Rewind about to about 2 years ago when I first got into this industry and I kept saying ‘oh, $500 a month while I sleep would be good enough for me’ and I truly meant it – at that time. People kept telling me once I reached that point I would want more, and of course I didn’t believe them.

So much I’ve learned since then.

Once I was up to $500 a month I wanted that to be $1000, then I wanted it to be $3000 and etc. Well eventually I did reach that point and boy was I on flying. I was so happy with myself, spending money left and right, not really working, and just generally having fun with life. It was honestly the best 6+ months of my life. Did way more things than I had in the past, met a lot of new people, travelled to a bunch places and events and so much more.

This all sounds well and good so what’s the problem?

Cockiness.

Once I started surpassing the amount of money I wanted to earn per month ‘while I slept’ I basically stopped working, and just partied with friends. Sure, I did a bit of work here and there but nowhere near what was required to keep things a-float.

This ended up with me spending all my profits and not re-investing them in any new or, already successful ventures. Huge fucking mistake.

Classic mistake that probably everyone makes but nobody really wants to admit. We’ve all seen the warnings in forums and on IRC but I think a lot of us refuse to believe it will ‘happen to me’. Well, I’m here to tell you that it does, and probably will.

Let’s face it, when you aren’t making any significant money and then suddenly you’re making quite a bit of money while you sleep it’s pretty fucking fantastic. This makes it very easy to lose sight of the original goal, which for me anyway, is to make enough income passively to live and have fun without having to sit at a computer all the time.

This past month it’s really hit hard, with paying bills becoming troublesome etc. And, I’m basically right back to where I didn’t want to be – grinding 60-70 hours a week at the computer just to get back to where I was originally. Had I stuck with it, I’d probably still be down around 5-7 hours of work a week to attain the same financial benefit.

All in all, great lesson learned. I wish I wouldn’t have had to learn it this way, but overall it’s probably best I did because nothing teaches like experience. Take it from me guys (and, gals) don’t get cocky when you start profiting, and keep at it, cause surer than shit something will fail and you’ll go from making thousands, to nothing, literally overnight.

Popularity: 29% [?]

Megapinger Review...

A couple of weeks ago I was happy to receive a review copy of MegaPinger from the Mattseh at the WickedFire Forums. Fast forward a couple weeks, and I’ve finally had a chance to put it through the tests and see what it’s like for pinging massive amounts of links quickly, and efficiently.

What came in the file?

An executable, some text files, the license, and a pretty boring Readme file. I understand this program was made by a programmer, so documentation will by default be lackluster; however the documentation for this is pretty much nonexistent. If you don’t know what you’re doing I could see this getting a bit confusing (and, from some of the comments in the forum thread for the program, it’s apparent that it is). But, if you

First Impressions

First off, I must say the threading is incredible. It did bog down my computer a little bit when I would put it up to 100+ threads, but that’s fine if doing it overnight and nothing else is running. When running with more than 10 threads, I did experience problems in Ableton Live and Reason though, so it is something to note. Especially since I’m running on a Quad Core with 4GB of Ram.

What’s It Do?

So, what’s the program all about? Simple really, you load into it a list of your links, and optionally some spun titles, and it will run through your list and submit them to the common services out there to hopefully aid you in getting quick and relevant backlinks (depending on your titles, and submissions of course).

Does It Support Proxies?

The other great thing about this program is the option of using proxies. I used scrapebox to sort my list of proxies, and then I just loaded the same file in MegaPinger and was instantly sending my pings out through proxies instead of direct to the site from my lowly cable modem. Great stuff.

First Run

I tested it out on some small link lists, and everything worked great including the title spinning for submissions. Then I decided I should put it to the real test, and I loaded up my list of all links from the past little while (around ~4400 of them).  This told me there was about 398912 pings to be sent out, and gave me a fancy little progress bar.

Then I loaded my list of proxies into Megapinger and set it to run. These proxies are kept in a simple text file in the MegaPinger directory. Along with the failed and succeeded ping lists text file that you can refer to later.

I let this run, and kept an eye on the CPU usage and memory usage, and it was pretty constant to what this screenshot shows below.

This process took about 24 hours to run, if I kept it down at 50 threads. When I increased it I was up to about 300 pings a minute, so the time went drastically down. So far so good. Much quicker than any other pinger I’ve used and I’m sure I could have tossed it up to 500 threads and got upwards of 800 pings a minute with fast proxies, but I didn’t have time to test that much.

Problems

I did notice a slight issue, that if you pause the pinger and start it again, for some reason it would double my ‘left to be pinged’ list, and thusly re-ping all the sites it had already done. Minor annoyance since I don’t really pause MegaPinger, but something to note.

As of this writing a support ticket, and message has been sent on the forum to Mattseh without a reply (but it hasn’t been very long! ).

Overall

MegaPinger is a Great product with a great price. Aside from the small bug mentioned above I don’t see why you shouldn’t be using this to ping your links.

I’m not going to get into whether pinging is worth it or not, there are many sides to that argument, which you guys can discuss in the comments

Popularity: 25% [?]