Ad/Banner Management/Rotation for Ruby on Rails?

Question

Hi,

I have a niche site that I'd like to sell banners for directly, rather than going through adsense. I need a system to manage the whole process: displaying ads and an administrative interface to manage them. It doesn't have to be anything terribly fancy, although open source is greatly preferred so that I can grow the system as needs be. Since the site itself is in Rails, I would prefer something for that environment. Googling turns up bunches of them in PHP, but the results are a bit polluted and I didn't have any luck finding one that was done in/for Rails.

If I don't find one, I suppose I'll see what I can do to hack together something and release it myself under an open license.

Another possibility is this: http://www.google.com/admanager - anyone have anything to say about it? Is it right for someone just selling a few ads for a not-so-big site?

Thanks, Dave

Answer 1

The company I work for has several Rails projects. We searched for a Rails banner management system but we didn't find any commercial/open source project available.

We integrated Google AdManager and I have to say it's definitely a good choice. It lacks some advanced features available in Openx, but we didn't miss them for our projects.

Answer 2

You can give this rails-ad-server a try. Please give us all a feedback too. http://github.com/coolblade/rails-ad-server

Answer 3

Dave, we have recently released AdServerBeans MyAds v.0.4 (http://www.adserverbeans.com) which you might be interested to take a look at. It's open source and we position it as an alternative to OpenX.