The software enables web site administrators to rotate banners from both in-house advertisement campaigns as well as from paid or third-party sources, such as Google's AdSense.

OpenX Source began as phpAdsNew, a fork from a similar project called phpAds, created by Tobias Ratschiller in 1998.

[citation needed] During the time period between 2001 and 2002, Wim Godden led the phpAdsNew project and later received help from developers such as Niels Leenheer and Phil Hord, continually adding new features and improving the existing ones.

Features that were built for phpAdsNew 2.0 were also integrated into the latest OpenAds software, which at this point had reached version 2.3.

In 2020 and 2021, compromised Revive ad servers were used to deliver malvertising (advertisements which led victims to install malware).