Recently I noticed that my site was showing some kind of error in place where OpenX was supposed to serve ads. As I had no time to troubleshoot, it was left that way for quite sometime.

This is what was shown in the OpenX ad zone, a phrase that says “$creative_html”. Hey, what does that mean?

I did some searches on the web and OpenX forum but there’s not much info than could help me with this problem.

I actually have several ads linked to this zone so the very first step was to remove all of them and added them back one by one. Each time I reloaded the webpage to see if anything happened.

First few ads were added and there was no problem to be seen i.e. the ads loaded and rotated as normal. The ads showed up such as the example below.

However when I linked “OpenX Market Advertiser - Default Campaign” to the zone and refreshed the browser, I got the “error” again. Removed it and it’s gone. Did this few times and it’s very consistent that the culprit was the OpenX ads.

Now I know why it was not working but still can’t tell what’s really wrong. OpenX Market ads will have to stay out of my site until someone fixed this error.

Are you seeing this too? Please share.