Project Wonderful Introduction
You’ve probably notice the Project Wonderful ad box in my sidebar. Project Wonderful allows you to auction off ad space on your site to the highest bidder, or bid or ad space. It uses an ebay style auction system that allows you to set maximum bids, so you don’t have to stay tied to the computer.
What I like so far
- You have the option to approve (or reject) all advertisers. Although I’m set to not run anything NSFW (not safe for work), that didn’t stop something I considered very NSFW showing up as a bid.
- You can automatically approve ads from sites you’ve already approved. That’s a big time saver.
- You can control the placement and number of ads.
- It gives small sites or those just getting in to advertising a way to sell some ads.
What I don’t like
- So far, the prices have been very low. I’m hoping that as the site builds a track record, the price will go up. As it is, it’s hardly worth the trouble.
- In order to sell ads, I almost have to accept a lot that don’t have a lot of relevance to the site.
- Project Wonderful uses their own code to estimate page views, which is much less than what my stats software calculates.
- You can’t make some alterations to the ad block once bidding has started. So, things like placement and the number of ads can’t be easily changed.
I’ve been running it only a couple of days, so I’m still open. These are just my initial reactions, and I’ll keep you up to date as the month progresses.
| 2.5 |
February 9th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I have a good guess at which NSFW ads showed up in your approval queue. If you don’t know, you can block users so they can’t bid on your boxes.
I haven’t seen a blog get really high bigs. Entrecard gets like $9 a day on a box just like yours. Some very popular web comics get $8-10 bucks a day on a single ad box.
I’ve found that one good ad can get you lots more traffic than 25 really cheap/free ads.
One thing I like is how easy it is to convert ad income to advertising, and you don’t need to wait until you get $100 to get your money, like some ad services require.
I’ve noticed sometimes me header ad gets more views then my footer. I think this is from people not letting the page load all the way then leaving. This may also effect the difference between total views and PJW ad box views, not sure. I also believe that too many boxes lowers your price. Supply and demand.
Those are my thoughts.