A new type of agency adserver I

I've been thinking about the agency side adserver. Alot.

It seems to me that there are a plethora of publisher side adservers out there and it's easy to see why. There are more publishers than there are agencies. It's a bigger market and one which is more lucrative. This has led to some great adservers in the publisher space and even an open source one - openX which is used by small publishers the world over. But how about the agency side?

By default people use DFA. It's a decent system and they've got enough in there for everyone's need. They also allow you to do the other things like templates and rich media without too much extra cost. Some people find the workflow good as well (these people no doubt have just been using it too long - start flaming now). There are other solutions out there but they are too expensive, agencies don't operate with the kind of profit margins that publishers do. Most other agency adservers are more what I would consider evolutionary than revolutionary, they put in a couple of extra features or smooth some things out but they don't really do anything extremely different.

This is where I start thinking. If you could build your own adserver from scratch, what would you do different. There are obviously some steps that need to be in there such as uploading a schedule, uploading creatives and assigning creatives to schedule and creating tags based on the schedule, but how should these be done? Also what features do the current adservers have? How can we make serving cheaper? How can we make sure that the solution is future-proof?

I've been having a look and I think the technology is finally here to solve a lot of these problems. Node.js is blazingly fast (asynchronous IO), and allows a common language between front end and back end - javascript. CDN networks display static files at a fraction of the cost. Cloud computing and platform as a service (PaaS) allows instantly scaling architecture. NoSQL databases allow fast information retrieval, sideways scalability and the flexibility to add new functionality easily. New javascript engines and HTML5 will allow more complexity on the client side by being faster and allowing local storage and non breaking I/O with the server (ever wanted to add in fields and take them out in real time to see what a report would look like?)

So what is the plan? I will attempt to build an adserver. It's quite an ambitious plan I admit. To pull this off I'll need to become an expert in client side javascript (I'm going to go with JQuery & JQuery UI), HTML5, Node.js, expressJS (application MVC framework for Node.js), MongoDB (NoSQL DB), AWS (amazon web services to be used as a platform, may change to Joyent or Cloud Foundry), CDN options and whole range of other concepts in between while balancing a job and social life. The main thing to get first is enough knowledge to start coding and a plan as to how things will work. I have been studying for the past couple of weeks and believe I have enough knowledge to start some simple things and luckily the framework will be flexible so I can change things as I see better ways but in the next installment I will unfold the full extent of my plans

run function after DOM loaded

Here is a bit of code that will call the functions runAds() after the DOM has loaded. This is getting a bit advanced, but fun if you want to fiddle. Just be aware that IE will let you document.write stuff to the page at this point, but Firefox will start a new page if you want to document.write anything in. So if you are using this, you'll need to do it by adding iframes in to the source and load the ads in through there:





var alreadyrunflag=0 //flag to indicate whether target function has already been run

if (document.addEventListener)
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function(){alreadyrunflag=1; runAds()}, false)
else if (document.all && !window.opera){
document.write('\<script type="text/javascript" id="contentloadtag" defer="defer" src="javascript:void(0)"\>\<\/script\>')
var contentloadtag=document.getElementById("contentloadtag")
contentloadtag.onreadystatechange=function(){
if (this.readyState=="complete"){
alreadyrunflag=1
runAds()
}
}
}

try{
var backupOnload = window.onload;
window.onload=function(){
if((typeof(backupOnload) != "undefined") &&(backupOnload != null)){backupOnload();}
setTimeout("if (!alreadyrunflag) runAds()", 0)
}
}catch(e){}


another one you might like to play with is the defer attribute for calling an external script:

document.write('\<SCR' + 'IPT SRC="' + allAds + '?" type="text/JavaScript" onLoad="runAds();" defer="defer" language="JavaScript"\>');
document.write('\</SCR' + 'IPT\>');

have fun - but remember that we're starting to push the boundaries of what we can do with our adcode here, so test in all browsers and different versions and then make sure you test with all sorts of ads including rich media

get query string value

Most people will be trying to get values from a query string by using the .split() javascript function. Basically the way to do this is to grab your string after the first question mark

string = string.substring(string.indexOf("?")+1);

then splitting on ampersand

values = string.split("&");

then going through each value checking for the left hand side and returning the right if it matches

for(i=0;i\<values.length;i++)
if((values[i].split("="))[0] == name)
try{return (values[i].split("="))[1]}catch(e){return ""};
return "";

I have also done it in the past just using string indexOfs:

//zMSmyStr is the query string, zMStagline is the variable name being searched for
function zMSgetValue(zMSmyStr,zMStagline)
{
zMSmyStr = zMSmyStr+"=";
var zMSind = zMStagline.indexOf(zMSmyStr)+zMSmyStr.length;
if(zMSind==(zMSmyStr.length-1)) //test for myStr not found
return "";
zMStagline += "&";
return zMStagline.substring(zMSind,zMStagline.indexOf("&",zMSind));
}

but I decided to save space to redo these as a regex and save time and space. So here it is:

function fd_fn_Query(myQS)
{
try{
return myURL.match(new RegExp("\[?&]"+myQS+"=([^&]*)"))[1];
}catch(e){return "";}
}

much smaller and easier to use, feel free to take this and modify to suit your needs.