New Zero-Dollar Bidding System

Thursday, January 04 2007 @ 08:19 PM GMT

In an interesting move, Project Wonderful has decided to change the way that zero-dollar bidding works.  In the past, any bid for no dollars and no cents could be outbid by an equal shot - that is, replaced by the most recent $0.00 bid.  This worked pretty well, for a time - before people with far too much time on their hands got around to placing new $0.00 bids every day.  The new changes made this week are set to encourage a new influx of money into the Project Wonderful system, stirring up the economy a bit, and they're detailed in "Read More."

As of January 2nd, 2007, bids worth $0.00 cannot be outbid by other $0.00 bids, but run for a maximum of two days.  This means that all the adverts you had up at $0.00 before January 2nd got two days of guaranteed free advertising, without the theat of somebody else coming along and replacing them without paying.  And then, of course, you could sit around and watch your monitor, hawklike, as your bid expired - and simply stick it in again with lightning speed, for another hassle-free two days.

Or so it would seem.  True enough, if that were the only change made, it would make things worse, not better.  But it wasn't the only change - you can now bid in one-cent increments up to ten cents.  You can knock the free advertisers off the spot for a penny!

For very low-traffic websites, this has been a welcome change.  Rather than $0.00, they're now getting $0.01.  Woo.

For middling-to-low traffic websites, the change has been rather unwelcome.  Plenty of users have seen their bids go down from $0.50 a day to $0.05 a day, which is not cool at all.  However, it was kind of inevitable that sooner or later, the tide would shift in the opposite direction as more and more publishers signed up, and advertisers had more sites to choose from - and pennies a day are better than nothing.  Plus, there's always the opportunity to sink those pennies back into the system by bidding on some other low-traffic sites.

One other change that was introduced is the ability to bid on an entire ad box and say "Give me the cheapest one here, please."  This was requested pretty well right from the start, and is ready to rock right now.

This change has an interesting effect in that while advertising is served as cheaply as possible to the guy saying "Give me the cheapest," the rates are pushed up to a minimum of his price for everybody else on the same ad box.

For example, an ad box that looks like this:

$0.20

$0.50

$0.40

$0.20

$0.80

$0.70

$0.60

$0.20

Will look like this if Mister Cheapest puts in a bid for fifty cents and gets in at thirty:

$0.30

$0.50

$0.40

$0.30

$0.80

$0.70

$0.60

$0.30

So, I think we can expect much more money for the bigger publishers, a fairer deal for the advertisers, and more realistic rates for smaller publishers, which will lead to a more stable and durable economy.

Another, slightly more worrying aspect of the limit on zero-dollar bids is that it could lead to a lot more sites displaying "your ad here" notices, which suck pretty hard.  Does anybody know yet if expired $0 bids are allowed to continue if there's nothing to take their place?

What do you think?  Comments are enabled.

Comments (2)

Project Wonderful Talk
http://www.projectwonderfultalk.com/article.php/new_project_wonderful_bidding_system