Revive Adserver turns 8!
Revive Adserver turns 8!
Today we celebrate the 8th anniversary of the Revive Adserver project.
On September 13, 2013, we unveiled the new Revive Adserver open source project, and released a brand new version 3.0 to the world.
Although the software already had a long history at the time, the predecessor of Revive Adserver did not get the love and care it deserved. Our project team was created to take the ad serving system under its wings and revitalize it.
Here is a very brief rundown of some of the many things we achieved in the 8 years since.
Download edition – from 2013
Since that first release of version 3.0.0 in September 2013, we’ve continued working on making the software faster, more secure, and more powerful. There have been over 30 new releases in these 8 years. To date, there are more than 6,000 known self-hosted installations of the Download edition, and probably many more we don’t know about.
Revive Software and Services – from 2015
In order to secure the future of the Revive Adserver open source project, we formed a legal entity called Revive Software and Services in 2015. The goal of this company was and still is to act as the guardian of the intellectual property rights for the software even when project members may not be participating in the future. It also enables us to correctly handle sponsorships and paid services, for example in light of fiscal regulations, and to work with outside vendors, contractors, service providers and (who knows, in the future) paid employees.
Patreon – from 2017
In 2017, we created a Patreon program, enabling companies and individuals using Revive Adserver to share a small (or large) portion of the revenue they make with the ad server with our project. A loyal group of sponsors contribute to our project every month. Most of them have set their contribution to $10 per month, but we’re also incredibly grateful that a few sponsors contribute as much as $150 every month.
Hosted edition – from 2018
On the 5 year project anniversary in 2018, we announced the creation of a hosted service for Revive Adserver. This service is intended for people interested in using the software, but lacking the time, skill, resources or patience to install, configure and maintain a self-hosted ad server.
The Revive Adserver Hosted edition took off in a big way after we started inviting subscribers in the fall of 2018. Nowadays, hundreds of subscribers use the service every single day, in order to display hundreds of millions of ads every month.
Thanks to the community!
The continued use of our software by a large community is what drives us to keep going. It’s very rewarding to work on a free, open source, ad serving system that is a real alternative to the huge and anonymous corporate ad systems that seem to dominate the internet these days. Revive Adserver enables companies, big and small, to take control of the advertising on their sites and apps, without having to worry about what will happen with their data.
This also motivated us to take on a large project in 2021. In the year when we celebrate our 8th anniversary, we’re releasing the next version of Revive Adserver that supports both PHP 8 and MySQL 8. Version 5.3.0 will be released on September 14, 2021. Watch this space!