Gazeta Express is Kosovo's most prominent online news portal. Founded in 2005 in Pristina, it covers breaking news, investigative journalism, and editorial commentary in Albanian. It is the most visited media outlet in the Balkans, with daily traffic across Kosovo, Albania, and the diaspora worldwide.
Running advertising at that scale, in a market most global ad platforms do not officially support, requires infrastructure that goes well beyond defaults. For Gazeta Express, that meant solving problems that Google AdSense and open-source software were not built to handle.
Advertising in a Market Google Does Not Serve
Kosovo's status as a state with limited international recognition has direct consequences for digital advertising. Google AdSense does not operate there. Albanian is not supported as a targeting parameter. Kosovo does not have designated IP addresses, so the audience splits between Serbian and Albanian IP ranges depending on the provider.
For a publisher monetizing 30 to 40% of its audience from outside Kosovo and Albania, those constraints are not edge cases. They are the core of the ad operations problem.
For a publisher monetizing 30 to 40% of its audience from outside Kosovo and Albania, those constraints are not edge cases. They are the core of the ad operations problem. The team summed it up plainly:
“We could not target our own audience with the tools the rest of the market takes for granted. Every solution we tried required working around something.”
The team needed a platform that could handle language-level targeting, complex IP combinations, and geotargeting logic simultaneously. Standard programmatic tools offered none of that.
Why Open-Source Stopped Being Enough
Gazeta Express had been running on Revive, a widely used open-source ad server. The price was right. The flexibility was there, in theory. In practice, the team was spending a growing share of its time maintaining infrastructure rather than growing the ad business.
Every technical issue was their problem to solve. There was no support line. When ad load times slowed the site, Revive had no answer. When the ad display accuracy dropped to 79 percent, the team had nowhere to escalate.
The account team at Epom recognized the situation immediately:
“Publishers running on open-source often reach a ceiling where the cost of maintenance outweighs the savings on licensing. Gazeta Express had clearly passed that point. The question was not whether to switch. It was how quickly we could move them.”
In 2015, Gazeta Express switched to Epom Ad Server. The comparison between the two platforms made the decision straightforward.
| Criteria | Revive (Before) | Epom Ad Server |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance | Self-managed. Constant updates required. | Fully hosted. Zero infrastructure overhead. |
| Uptime | Reliability depended on the client’s own setup and maintenance. | 95%+ guaranteed uptime. |
| Support | No dedicated support for technical issues. | Dedicated team. Direct line to engineers. |
| Targeting | Could not support Gazeta Express’s language, geo, and IP targeting needs | Language, geo, IP, custom combinations. |
| Ad Formats | Limited support for custom ad formats without extra technical work. | No-code rich media templates included. |
| Prioritization | Not enough for 200+ advertisers and complex delivery rules. | Banner filtering, weighting, daisy-chaining, campaign-level priorities. |
Before committing to the switch, Gazeta Express needed to confirm that Epom could handle their specific requirements. The criteria were unusual enough that most platforms could not meet all of them.
Why Epom Ad Server:
- Handle Albanian language targeting, which most platforms do not support
- Combine IP and geo targeting for a market without designated IP addresses
- Manage 200+ advertisers with robust prioritization and weighting logic
- Serve custom ad formats without developer involvement
- Provide continuous technical support with guaranteed uptime
Six Features That Changed How Gazeta Express Operates
Once the platform was fully configured, the team described the shift in straightforward terms:
“Publishers with audiences spanning multiple IP ranges and language groups often come to us after exhausting other options. For Gazeta Express, the targeting configuration required careful setup. Once it was running, it ran without intervention for years.”
The six features that drove the change:
- Geotargeting. Ads vary by user location. With 30 to 40 percent of readers outside Kosovo and Albania, delivery accuracy improved immediately.
- Language targeting. Albanian-language support, rare on most ad platforms, was available out of the box.
- IP targeting. Albanian and Serbian IP ranges are combined with location data to correctly identify and reach Kosovan users.
- Prioritization. With 200+ active advertisers, Gazeta Express needed robust logic for banner filtering, weighting, daisy-chaining, and campaign-level priorities.
- Custom ad formats. CTRs range from 0.12% to 0.28% depending on the advertiser. No-code templates cover redirect ads, responsive banners, and interstitials.
- Impression limits. Fixed-deal advertisers require guaranteed delivery caps. Epom's limit functionality manages this automatically.
The ad delivery architecture that makes all of this work looks like this:
| Layer | What It Does |
|---|---|
| Advertiser Accounts (200+) | Campaigns, creatives, and limits are configured per advertiser inside the Epom Ad Server. |
| Prioritization Engine | Banner filtering, weighting, and daisy-chaining logic determine which ad serves for each request. |
| Targeting Layer | Geotargeting, IP targeting (Albanian and Serbian ranges), and Albanian-language targeting applied per impression. |
| Custom Ad Format Templates | Redirect ads, responsive banners, and interstitials rendered without developer involvement. |
| Epom Ad Server Core | Hosted infrastructure with 95%+ uptime. Zero maintenance required from the Gazeta Express team. |
| Gazeta Express Website | Ads are served correctly 99% of the time. Page load speed improved by 137%. |
Results: Years of Compounding Performance
Gazeta Express switched to Epom in 2015. The results that followed were not one-time gains. They compounded across a decade of partnership.
| Metric | Before Epom | With Epom | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Website Loading Speed | Baseline | +137% improvement | +137% |
| AdOps Team Productivity | Manual open-source mgmt | 50% more output | +50% |
| Annual Impressions | Baseline (2018) | 2.1B per year | +27% |
| CTR for Partners | Baseline (2018) | Significantly higher | +59% |
| Ad Display Accuracy | 79% of the time | 99% of the time | +20pp |
Website loading speed improved by 137% after the infrastructure switch. Ad display accuracy increased from 79% to 99%. The AdOps team, freed from open-source maintenance, redirected 50% of its capacity to strategic and business development work.
Compared to 2018, Gazeta Express delivers 27% more impressions and a 59% higher CTR for advertising partners. The platform now processes 2.1 billion impressions per year.
“Gazeta Express has been with us for ten years. That does not happen by accident. It happens when the platform keeps performing, and the team behind it keeps showing up. That is the standard we hold ourselves to with every publisher we work with.”
Gazeta Express is now trusted by Project Agora, ProCredit Bank, Shell, Toyota, Domino's, and Jysk. The targeting functionality, technical stability, and support model that brought them to Epom in 2015 continue to drive the business forward.
