I've been a longtime lurker here, and just today I finally decided to register. Low and behold, I just discovered this forum runs exactly what I'm looking for in terms of forum advertising software. I've literally spent months looking for software to do what the ad software here does. I've also spent over quite a bit of money on addons that have promised to do this but failed to do so. I'm quite desperate, as like I've said, I've been looking for what feels like forever. I can't use AdSense since my site pertains to firearms and all my advertising for my barely-monetized 1.8million pageview site has to come from people who contact me directly. I then have the add the banner links via old school HTML and keep track of dates, payments, etc. with no reporting for myself or my advertisers as all. As bad as I'd like to contact Shawn directly and ask him about procuring the system for my site, I'm sure he gets tons of contact though he asks not to contact him in his signature. I'm hoping either he'll see this or someone else can answer this for me. I spent the last two hours searching this site looking for an answer before creating this thread.
Seems everytime I find what I'm looking for that's the answer I get Any idea, ballpark, what it might cost me to have someone develop software like that for my site? This site I own, it isn't some fly by night operation. It's the largest 2nd amendment site in the Northwest, and I don't know what I'm doing in this regard.
Sorry, it was something we built in-house for just our site. We *may* license it or something in the future, but right now it's not ready for that. For example it requires a custom compiled PHP version and some other things and I don't really have time to offer support. We'll see... but the immediate future, it's just for in-house on this site. As far as cost of getting someone to do it, it all depends on how good of a programmer they are.
If switching to IPB is an option, the upcoming IP.Nexus addon is pretty much identical. http://community.invisionpower.com/blog/1174/entry-5105-ipnexus-dev-update-advertisements/
Are you sure it's identical? I don't see the ability to bid on ad space, bid on keywords, allow users to target ads to specific forums, sub-domains, etc. If you want something pretty vanilla like that, you could just use this: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=131150
Shawn that would be great if you could offer some type of licensing of your DigitalPoint Ad Management software. I checked out vB AdManagement 4 and it appears there's quite a bit of bugs w/ IE 8 and the author hasn't been on vbulletin.org in a few years.. InvisionPower's Nexus seems like it would do the trick, but I'm having a difficult time trying to convert over from vB + vBseo.
There are a few problems with licensing it (even if we wanted to)... It requires a custom compiled version of PHP It requires a custom daemon be installed on the server to handle some of it's background tasks that can take more than an instant It's a pretty big resource hog since it's calculating ad costs (and down-bidding) in realtime and it also logs a MASSIVE amount of data to the database (in the 3 months we've been using it, we have 10GB of data from the ad system in the DB) since it has to log every impression and click. That being said, I would like to somehow allow people to use it, just not sure how yet without making it a support nightmare for myself when people can't compile PHP or install new daemons on their server.