The Advertising Network of Kings on a Budget

Project Wonderful is the ad system produced by Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics etc) a few years ago, partly to better satisfy the needs of the web-comic community (who were the earliest adopters), but also for general usage. It's a pretty good deal for everybody- if you have a small-fry site like mine, you can put up a couple of ad boxes and even though you won't make megabucks, you will at least make something. For a handful of more high profile sites, it can be kinda like a 2ndary source of income (certainly not enough to quit your day job if you live in the 1st world, but fairly good money all the same). Meanwhile if you want to advertise something of your own, you can get some great bargains (this will generally require a little work on your part to pick good places to advertise, and to check how the different ads are performing). And of course, you can do both, very many people do. If you have a website it's worth signing up for whichever purpose. Even if many of those you see on it are web-comic sites, you certainly don't have to be, that's just the bulk of its user-base, because the system is so well-known to that community and suits its needs very well. But more and more sites of various sorts are finding that actually it suits them very well too, and some quite big advertisers are using it as well, coming to pounce on the bargains.

Things you need to know about it

• Project Wonderful is not Google Ads, or any other advertising network, they are Project Wonderful. Duh. As such, should it really be a big shock that they happen to do things differently to the other networks? Apparently it is to some people who get all in a tizzy about it for one reason or another.
• One of the main differences (apart from that a lot of ad spaces will get bid on by web-comic authors), is that rather than just saying "right I want my ads placed in this sort of place" and then hoping for the best, you directly choose the spaces you want, for yourself. One of the other main differences, is that you bid on the spaces, in an auction-like system. They call it "the infinite auction", and explain it with nice easy examples on their site. Your bid is not for the price of a number of showings of your ad, nor a number of clicks of your ad, but of showing your ad for a day. Which is the third main difference.
• Just because it's the "price per day", doesn't mean that if someone bids and then stops their bid a few hours later, that you don't get paid. If their ad was shown for any period of time, they pay for that time. 12 hours for $1/day, would be $0.50, not nothing. Simple, huh? This goes all the way down to even if the bid is for $0.01/day- Project Wonderful keep track of minute fractions of a cent. You're not going to get ripped off. This also works the other way, you can bid on a $100/day ad space even if you only have $0.02 in your account- you'd just get under 30 seconds worth for it, and the owners of the ad box will get 75% of your 2 cents.
• Which brings up one of the other main differences: Project Wonderful, like any other ad network, takes some of the earnings for an ad box, but unlike many they take quite little. You get 75% of what's paid for each bid, and furthermore you can take your earnings out once you've earnt just $10, which is far sooner than some others. If you're taking some time to reach the $10 you can still use your earnings on advertising for yourself.
• If you want to set up ad spaces on your site, Project Wonderful staff will apparently have to check that your site meets a certain level of quality and completeness (eg, so people don't put up empty sites that they're just going to cram with adverts, for instance) This may not be all that clear before you sign up.
• You can search Project Wonderful for advertising spaces to bid on, in various ways, including via tags/keywords, and all sorts of other criteria. I suspect some people overlook this? Some also overlook picking suitable tags/keywords for their own ad spaces, which makes them MUCH harder to find, and thereby drags their prices down. You don't want to do that, do you? Also avoid using keywords such as "the" or "of" or "and", which currently they don't filter out. They will only get used by mistake. Which I guess is another thing to avoid doing :)
• You can set a minimum bid on your ad boxes (it's generally a bad idea though); if you don't, and your site is popular enough with advertisers, the cost of bids will go up anyway as people's bids clash with each other.
• One interesting effect when people have no minimum bid, is that sometimes advertisers can get free ad time, if nobody else is bidding on a space yet. This idea is actually an intentional part of the system, and in practice the spots tend to get leapt on quite quickly if there's no minimum bid, so there's really no need for site owners to fret "OMFG I won't get any munny!!1!!11", seriously.

some handy PW linkies

• "Project Wonderful Talk"; Unofficial PW blog/forum/wiki site thingy
• Article on PW official blog re "cancelled" bids- what it signifies, and that you do still earn money from them.
• "Planet Mike's" thoughts on PW's ad system, including an itemised summary of costs he had for advertising his site (his conclusion: much cheaper than Google)
• Project Wonderful Talk forums: ask for bids (for boxes that have no low bid). Probably a good place to find the odd bargain, and also a good way to get a few bids myself!
• PWT's Project Wonderful Wishlist thread, from 2007.
• A blogger's experience+review of using PW as an ad publisher, but from 2007 so not entirely up to date. Some of the commenters are even more out of date and some get things wrong (like the bloke thinking that cancelled bids get you no money).
• blog article re getting better returns from PW; I don't really understand what they're describing here, and I'm not sure how kosher it is. I don't use Google Adsense anyway so it's academic in my case.
• blogject wonderful article on getting bargain advert spots
• inspiring ad page, an advert on a coins forum, which (as I write this) has a $6/day or so ad from a professional numismatics company, whom I'm guessing signed up specifically in order to advertise on that site. I imagine the same would apply to various other specialist/popular sites too. In other words, if you have traffic, ad space, and a demographic most sites don't, you will probably bring in new advertisers of your own when you create the space. If other people do the same, some of those advertisers may then compete on your spaces too. update: not only does it not have any advert on it now, they seem to have taken the box down (or perhaps messed it up during a server change or such). The principle remains though :D