Campaign system is now live!

Authored by: spikydragon on Saturday, April 28 2007 @ 07:10 PM BST

> I don't know about you, but I for one will be watching Project Wonderful very closely for the next few days.

Me too .... and more with worry than with excitement, I think. Mixed feelings about the campaign system, currently wondering if I'll rather wait and see or go and try it out myself. Somewhat more worried about the minimum bids -- I kinda don't like it. For me part of the "fun" on PW was the appeal to bidders with small budgets, and sellers with small websites, to run ads on the minimum price of 0.01 (or even 0.00). Of course nobody has to set minimum bids, but people will, and I'm not sure if that will be a good thing for the overall economy.

We'll see, I guess.

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Authored by: spikydragon on Saturday, April 28 2007 @ 09:09 PM BST

And I have something to add -- with the minimum bids, those can only be set on an empty ad box. So far, I had one of my bids cancelled because the ad box owner wanted to set a minimum bid. Will we see a wave of cancellations now as people get their ad boxes emptied to set minimums? :)

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Authored by: Caveman Joe on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 01:08 AM BST

Hell, if other people want to take themselves out of the competition for the smaller bids, that's fine by me. More for the rest of us. ;)

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Authored by: Caveman Joe on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 01:07 AM BST

I do agree with your second point - the new system makes free advertising much harder to come by. I, for one, don't plan on using the minimum bid setting - not on this site, at least, and I doubt I'll use it on any. There should, in my opinion, always be the chance for free advertising, and if enough people feel the same way, then it won't die out any time soon.
But, Spikydragon, I implore you - if you're going to use this system at all, do it now, while it's still cheap! My ad boxes are already earning twice as much as they were this morning, and the bargains will be all snapped up before long - get a few good deals in there while you still can!

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Authored by: spikydragon on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 01:16 AM BST

Oh, I started a campaign pretty much right after I posted, and so far, it's running fine ;)
On my ad boxes though, no such luck -- and that's also the biggest fear that I have as a seller about the campaigns; it seems to favour the owners of small websites again, and those with mid-sized websites will lose the most in the long run; but maybe it evens out after a while ...
As a buyer, so far, a lot of my manual cheap bids have been suddenly outbid today, I assume by campaigns ;) But that's fine; I'll probably move most of the cheap bids to campaigns anyway, because it does save a lot of time.
So at the end of the day today, as a buyer I'm a bit excited about the new possibilities; but as a seller, I'm a bit worried about what the campaign system will do to the economy.

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Authored by: Caveman Joe on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 01:21 AM BST

Gah. Well, it's been less than 24 hours, after all - time will tell what happens next.
As for me, I'm over the moon - 24 friggin' cents per day, whoo. :) As paltry as that is, I'm still excited - even though I know it probably won't last terribly long. ;)

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Authored by: spikydragon on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 01:26 AM BST

Yeah, and it's a weekend, too; I have a feeling that Monday will be interesting... I guess a lot depends on if the campaign system will attract some big buyers, i.e. people who won't use the campaign system mainly to save time on placing lots and lots of small bids. Then I'll be happy too, I guess ;)

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Authored by: mskala on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 02:13 PM BST

It's cool that the system lets you search based on minimum bid, because that'll make it easy to look at how people are actually using the minimum bid feature. Here's the list. As of this writing, most people who are setting minimum bids are setting them at far more than the going rate for similar-traffic sites. If they have something else to put in the space that will pay better (let's say advertising for their own merchandise, or privately-negotiated ad deals), fine; but if they really expect to make those kinds of prices in the auctions, I think those people are going to be disappointed - unless campaign bidding raises prices across the board to the point that PW is competitive with other networks, which could happen and would be a good thing...

At the moment I have my campaigns set up not to bid on boxes that have a nonzero minimum bid. My reasoning is that at least at the moment, most people who set minimum bids are going to set them above what the boxes would be worth in a straightforward zero-reserve auction (otherwise they wouldn't bother), so by bidding on such a box it's likely I'll end up A. hitting the minimum bid and B. paying more than comparable advertising elsewhere, and it's not likely to be a good deal. But I'm watching that "who is using minimum bids?" list, and if I see that minimum-bid sites are competitive with others, I'll change my strategy. An argument *for* bidding on such sites is that I think a lot of *other* people will avoid them, and so bidding on them may be less intense.

I think the ideal use of minimum bids would be to set the minimum bid to a few notches less than the going rate - low enough to look like a serious bargain compared to auction prices - and then it'll help smooth out price crashes when bids expire and contribute to price stability. I don't know whether we can reasonably expect people to use minimum bids that way. All in all, I expect it to even out in the long run. The market will price in a premium or discount for the user of minimum bids, and it'll be very interesting to see how much that turns out to be. But I don't expect things to really stabilize for at least a month.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 08:23 PM BST

Well, the new campaigns are a mixed blessing for me at the moment... Sure, I get more money from my ad-box now (it's at an all-time high of 0.08$), but my own bids now cost me twice what they used to (almost a dollar a day). Urg. I'll give it a few days to stabilize, but if this keeps up, I'll have to cut back on buying advertising. If my experience is shared by many others, then I don't think campaigns are that great for small sites. Sure, you get more for your ad-boxes... but it'll cost you much more to advertize your own site. Getting $0.08 a day instead of $0.02 doesn't do any good when it leads to you losing visibility and exposure to avoid busting your budget.

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Authored by: Oualawouzou on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 08:25 PM BST

Er, sorry, forgot to log-in first.

---
Le champignon nouveau est arrivé.

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Authored by: spikydragon on Sunday, April 29 2007 @ 10:25 PM BST

Same here, so far, with own bids being twice as expensive -- I'm not earning more on my adboxes though than I was before. I really wonder what will happen when the weekend is over. My own small campaign that I set up is running OK at the moment -- but probably won't give as good results anymore once there is more competition. Well, I just checked my traffic report for this month and I'll have to cut back on advertising anyway (because I can't afford at the moment to draw in more traffic), so maybe the campaign system will just make this easier for me ;)
I'm wondering though about how to best run a campaign for higher-priced adboxes -- say, if I want to bid a max price of 0.50 instead of 0.01 (as I guess most people do -- use the campaign system to take care of the low-price adboxes). Even if I limit it to sites with a low CPM or high pageviews or whatever -- I would still think that I would catch adboxes like that which are seriously underperforming, so I would have to monitor the campaign bids all the time anyway, so it wouldn't even save me any time over manual bidding. Or not? Anyone thought this through yet?

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Authored by: mskala on Monday, April 30 2007 @ 03:28 AM BST

It's early yet, but so far I'm not conscious of campaigns making much difference to my numbers either way. I seem to be getting and paying about the same rates as before; more clicks in the last couple days but that's primarily because I also increased my budget. I wonder how much money is being spent through campaigns as opposed to manual bids at the moment. My guess is that we'll start to see real differences when a large fraction of all bids in the system are campaign bids, and I'm not sure that's happening yet.

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Authored by: spikydragon on Monday, April 30 2007 @ 11:32 AM BST

That, actually, reminds me of the single most compelling reasons why I will switch a good part of my advertising to campaigns sooner or later -- it's much easier to keep track on how much you are spending, as you can set a daily budget for the whole campaign, and it will try to meet that budget as closely as possible. With manual bids, especially if you keep outbid ones going, this is far more difficult.

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Authored by: kaol on Tuesday, May 01 2007 @ 08:06 AM BST

Currently the campaign system happily makes bids on different ad boxes on the same site from the same advertiser. I don't think that that's quite the best way to use their money or that they would bid like that if they were placing the bids by themselves. Not to mention that, as a person seeing the ads, I would prefer to have some variety in them.

Perhaps I should break the monotony of having the same ad run on every ad box on my site a bit by setting a minimum bid.

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Authored by: EddieC on Friday, May 04 2007 @ 04:36 AM BST

The question is, why are you using Project Wonderful? Is it to provide a place for no-to-low-priced advertising or is it to make some money for yourself? I'm thrilled with Ryan's work on PW, but I've also been one of the proponents of minimal bids.

First off, without minimums, I'm actually paying LESS than I used to for advertising. At WebbedComics.com, I ran an ad for my webcomic for about 2 years, paying $5 per month. SInce that switched over to PW, I've paid about $2 per month. Now, I like WebbedComics.com and I'm happy to pay the $5 per month. But with PW (before minimums) I COULDN'T because the auction model didn't push the prices high enough. But with minimums, then WebbedComics.com could set the price higher and I'd pay it and others would too, I think. The market would bear it. (For those without a calculator, $5/month is only $0.16 per day.)

Second, having more money in the overall advertising system will be better for everyone.

Third, setting minimums doesn't mean that the minimum prices will be off the charts. Is there anybody who is willing to pay $0.01 per day UNWILLING to pay, for example, $0.10 per day? Are we that cheap? Must this be a race to the bottom?

Note: On my site I haven't changed my ads over to minimums... yet... because my site is still in Beta. But when I go into full production release I intend to set minimums of at least $1/day for my more prominent ad boxes. The less prominent boxes may be cheaper. I may get fewer ads, but I think I'm going to make more revenue and the price is still very cheap. $1/day isn't that high in real world terms.

So, I'm glad we have minimums, even if it costs me more when I buy advertising. I love the completely open free-market nature of PW's original design, but the prices are just too low. IMHO.

Eddie

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Authored by: flo on Thursday, May 31 2007 @ 01:14 AM BST

Has anyone else noticed that on many of the lower sites (ie hundreds of views per day) all the ad boxes will be at $0.02 except for the last one which will be at $0.01 I see this over and over on many sites. I believe it must be a consequence of the campaign system, something in how their code operates.

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