ad rotator project

Hi everyone,

I am currently developing an ad management system ( ad rotator ) for personal use. My goal is to have a platform that allows me to freely manage the ad tags I'm using on my websites' pages without having to modify the pages every single time I want to swap / change an ad tag.

Aside from this I'm thinking that being able to use multiple tags would drastically increase my revenue by being able to send ad views to multiple ad networks while maintaining my visitors' engagement ( not spamming them with too many ads ).

I'm planning to insert the following options :
- each ad zone can have multiple ad tags assigned to it.
- each ad zone can be set to show random ad tags, send equal amount of impressions to each ad tag, set the display ad tag order manually, assign ad tags by country, browser or operating system
- each ad zone can be set to loop the ad tags endlessly or only once per visitor.
- get statistics by ad zone, ad tag and entire account grouped by day, country, browser or operating system.

The reason I'm creating this thread is because I was thinking to make the ad management system public ( free to use ), and I want some feedback if other webmasters would be interested in using it.

So, would you use it?
Should I bother releasing it as a free to use service?

 

@OP: It is nice to hear someone start working on Ad-Rotator. I have read your first post multiple times and it seems you already created good tool.

For someone which actively working with multiple companies and Adnetworks, Ad Rotator is considered one of the most important aspect in serving ads. I have used it since few years ago and it has become great tool for me.

As what have been stated by SarahK, there are well known Ad Rotators such as DFP, OpenX, etc. Even Wordpress has a plugin to rotate ads based on some criterias.
Those Ad Rotator have some features which are quite important but still lack few things which maybe needed by some publisher. If you could provide similar services and add another features which are not available in others, there is good chance your Ad Rotator would be used by many publishers.

To help you start with your project, I would share my experience while using Ads Rotator. I have used few Ads Rotator (custom built, WP Plugin, etc) and I think Google DFP (DoubleClick for Publisher) is good option because it has lots of features which I really wanted.

In my opinion, the most important aspect for Ad Rotator are:

1. It should be Reliable. (It should be able to handle high spike of request)
2. Has builtin Malware scanner. A bad ads have the opportunity to bring down our lovely websites. A good Malware Scanner is essential for Ad Rotator. It would minimize bad campaign to show up in our websites.
3. Allow multiple types of advertising codes (Graphic, JS, Direct Link, etc)
4. Has user friendly and detailed statistic.
5. Easy to use.
6. Integrated and nicely programmed API is a plus.

Well, that are six features which I really wanted in an Ad Rotator. Each Ad Rotator available in the market have their own strength and weakness. Some of it remain free while the other changed into paid tools.

By the way, feature number one and two (which I have listed above) are very important and should be available in any Ad Rotator.

Arick

 

First of all I'd like to thank you for the replies. I have to say I didn't think about a built in malware scanner, and it's a great idea!!! The rest of the aspects mentioned by @Arick unirow are something I thought of and are 100% doable. The reliability is very important and I think that if I decide to make project public it should pose no problem since my server has around 800 days uptime at the moment.

Going back to the malware scanner, I noticed that VirusTotal offers a free to use api which I could probably include.