[Editor's note: this article was written by Charlie Morris in August of 1998. As such, we cannot insure that information enclosed is up to date as of the time you are reading it. Please contact the vendors discussed for updated information on their individual offerings.]

Sample Standard Report from Open AdStream (22K)

Open AdStream is owned by Real Media, an ad-rep firm. It is also available for purchase, with prices starting at $8,000. Big clients include the New York Times and Washington Post. Targeting features are very extensive. Ads can be targeted by day/time, browser version, OS, domain, and by user profiles built from registration data. The online reports are very detailed, including breakdowns of impressions and clicks based on all targeting criteria that have been selected. The reports also include cool-looking graphs, which are generated by Java applets, which tends to make them a little dodgy.

Sample Targeting Page (22K)

OAS does not generate e-mail reports (although it does generate the online reports at scheduled times, so whipping up a script to send them as e-mail should be no great project). My contact at Real Media confided to me that they are "more of a rep firm" than a software developer. This might be a warning sign for those who want to buy OAS to use in-house, but then again, the other two big dogs may end up in the same boat sooner or later as well.

OAS's anti-caching functionality is pretty nifty. There are separate systems to defeat browser caching and proxy server caching, and you can choose to use either, both or none. Unlike some other packages, OAS runs on every flavor of UNIX that I could think of (as well as NT.)

Custom Report Interface Page (18K)