Project Wonderful Talk

Visitor Location details now available

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:10:38 +0000

Project Wonderful has now added visitor location information as a searchable element when you're looking for ad boxes to bid upon. You'll have to use the Advanced Search if you want to use this feature. Or, have a look at the bidding page for any particular ad box, and you'll see the new visitor location information box at the bottom of the page. (what, there's more people coming here from Spain than from the UK? Seriously?)

PW Reviews

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:05:00 +0000

Here are a couple of opinions from people trying out Project Wonderful for the first time, one as a publisher, and one as an advertiser.

Mixed feelings for Project Wonderful in this review from Weblog Tools Collection. The author seems to have the same problems that the rest of us are having - poor server performance (although this seems to have gotten much better lately), lack of advertisers, low prices for publishers. He also mentions PW's good points, praising the wide variety of ad types on offer and noting that using PW doesn't appear to negatively affect your PageRank. In the comments thread, Roman of Anawiki Games pointed out his pleasant experience as a PW advertiser.

In this article on Sodaware.net, Phil Newton describes what happened when he spent twenty bucks each on various different online advertising systems. No prizes for guessing which of the paid systems provided the best return. The author also mentions the phenomena we've seen before - in aggregate, smaller sites tend to give more visitors for less money.

From what I've seen, PW seems to be better for advertisers than it is for publishers right now. Of course, as more advertisers find out about PW's stellar value for money, competition will increase and things will hopefully get better for publishers too.

Project Wonderful WishList

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:39:23 +0000

It's been a while since we've done this, but I thought it'd be a nice idea to get everybody's Most Wanted features together. The Project Wonderful staff do lurk on PWT every now and then, so maybe by discussing what we'd like to see, we can actually make it happen. Here's my top ten. Feel free to add to the list - you can comment anonymously by passing a CAPTCHA test, use your LiveJournal or Blogger.com login, or make an account for Project Wonderful Talk and join the discussion! 1. Semi-Automatic Bidding The Campaign system has taken over a lot of the bidding for small sites. That's good, because it allows advertisers to spend lots of money very easily, and give the little guys a boost. It also makes the bids on smaller sites go up and down like yoyos, causes a lack of long-term bids, and leads to enormous fluctuations around the start of the month when everybody's campaigns expire and then get re-created. Perhaps a semi-automatic alternative would go down well. For example, there could be a checkbox next to each ad slot on the search results page, which would add the chosen slot to a shopping cart. You could then place identical bids on each and every marked result, by filling out just one form. Or, you could make one bid before you search, and then click a button marked "Bid on this ad box with parameters from your last bid." 2. A search for text-based ad slots As it is right now, you can't search for ad boxes that support text ads only. I think the radio buttons on the search page need to be changed to check boxes - one for text ads, one for graphic ads, both checked by default. 3. Extended support for free ads, and the end of "Your Ad Here." What I'd like to see, ideally, is no more "Your Ad Here" boxes. Project Wonderful's support for free adverts is truly wonderful, but does anybody still use them now that the Campaigns system eats them all up for us? The Your Ad Here boxes seem like a waste of good pixels that could be used more effectively. Here's some ideas: A) Extending the Campaigns system to allow free bidding, rationed out evenly between everybody using it for that purpose. B) Replacing "Your Ad Here" with a randomly-chosen advert from the system, and crediting the ad box owner with an impression of a nominated ad on someone else's ad slot. Thus, your ad box serves the role of a banner exchange until someone puts in a bid. Banner exchanges have sucked in the past and will continue to suck, but they're better than "Your Ad Here." C) An option to remove the ad box entirely from the page if there aren't any bids. Thus, skyscrapers with content above and below would disappear entirely, allowing the content to jump up from below. D) An extended limit on free ads. Having a two-day limit on free advertising is all well and good, but it's not much use if there aren't any more ads queued up to display afterwards, and results in a "Your Ad Here" of no use to man nor beast. Maybe an ad could be "immune" from being outbid by other zero-dollar bids for one day, but would then carry on displaying until another bid came along. E) Continuing on from above, there should be a simple button on the bidding form that says "Forget the details, just place a free bid - with ONE CLICK, BABY!" The free bid would be immune from other free bids for one day (or maybe two), and then would be able to be outbid by other free bids - but you wouldn't have to specify when it ended, and the system would assume you meant "Until Outbid." F) Continuing further - why not extend that to paid bids too? If a bid is placed for a week's worth of advertising at a penny a day, and then it expires but the only bid beneath it is a zero-dollar bid, the previously-paid advert should take on the zero-dollar winner status, and carry on being displayed for free until another bid is placed. 4. A "Pause" button If my account runs out of money, I don't want it to climb back up to a buck over a day and then run out of cash ten minutes later! Ten minutes of advertising is very little use, no matter how widespread. A simple "Pause my campaign" button would be much appreciated - and how about a "Pause all my bids" button, too? 5. Seperate reporting options for each ad box I would really like to know how much each individual ad box has made for me, how the bids have fluctuated, and so on. I like to know how well each site performs, how much money I can expect per thousand visitors, who clicks on which ads et cetera, and while AdSense will give me that data to geek over, Project Wonderful will not. Which brings me on to number six: 6. Division of funds I'd like to be able to seperate the money in my account between money to spend, and money earned. I know that when I deposit a hundred bucks into my Project Wonderful account, it's all going to get spent. That's fine with me, Project Wonderful delivers by far the best return on investment advertising-wise. However, I also run several sites with PW advertising on them, and I'd like to be able to see the money coming in, and keep it seperate from the money going out. At least until the start of the month, when I'll probably just end up moving it into my To Spend balance. 7. CSV Export I'd absolutely love to be able to press a button and get a snapshot of the current state of the market, in a format which I can import into OpenOffice (or upload to a set of custom PHP scripts running on a server somewhere) and dick around with. If we had a CSV export facility, or if Project Wonderful spat out a database dump once every hour, or couple of hours, or even once a day, how long d'you think it'd be before somebody came up with a snazzy Flash/AJAX frontend for sorting the data, identifying the bargains, showing the movers and shakers? Export of my own activity within PW would also be a wonderful thing to have, complete with cross-referenced CPC and CPM per bid, so I can study the data and perfect my bidding strategies. 8. Multiple ads per bid On ad boxes that don't require approval, I'd like to be able to submit two or three different ads in the same bid, and have them rotated with each impression. Statistics could then be generated on which ads get more clicks in the exact same spot on the exact same site, which would be very useful. 9. Optimisation options in Campaign settings As it is, Campaigns won't place bids on all the boxes that they could place bids on. In mails to Ryan, he's mentioned that he's doing some behind-the-scenes tweaking in the hope of giving Campaigns better value for money, which I think is a good idea. However, I'd like to have some control over the automatic bidding process myself - maybe even in the form of a simple slider between Exposure and Value. With the lever all the way over to the right, the campaign would bid only on the ad boxes with the absolute best CPM, trying to give you better value for your advertising dollars. On the left, it'd simply bid indiscriminately across all the boxes that came up in the Search results when you set up the campaign, getting more clicks but costing more for each one. 10. Options to group ads together, and link those ad groups with ad boxes For publishers and advertisers with more than one website, this would make it easier to see how each site is performing. You'd get a page that said "You've spent $(dollars).(cents) advertising (project or website - group name, in other words), using (num) different ads, and here's how each one of them has performed." Link the ad group with an ad box (or group of ad boxes) and you'd get a page like the one above, but which also said "And you've made $(dollars).(cents) back, from these (num) ad boxes, and here's how much each particular one has made." More reporting is always good - and all this data is already in the PW system, it just needs to be sorted and presented. Those are my ten Most Wanted features for Project Wonderful. What are yours? Comments are enabled - speak up, and let's make it happen!

Thoughts on the Project Wonderful ad system

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 13:16:00 +0000

[intro from Caveman Joe]
Project Wonderful Talk member planetmike submitted this news via the "Contribute" link - thanks, planetmike!
You might, if you run a small site and accept campaign bids, recognise his ads - the ones that say "We play Christmas music 24 / 7." The first time I saw that advert, I mentally added a word and read it as "WARNING - we play Christmas music 24 / 7," but as I found out shortly after, some folks really dig this sort of stuff. In this article, planetmike talks about his success using Project Wonderful, and it makes for some interesting reading. I wouldn't have thought there'd be so much of a market for a Christmas music site, but I guess there is. I'm rather pleasantly surprised. The world is a more ludicrous and beautiful place now that I know this.
Without further ado, here's the article. Enjoy!
[intro ends, planetmike's text begins]

I discuss how the Project Wonderful system has worked for me in October, and compare the expense and results to using Google Adwords.

PlanetMike: Thoughts on the Project Wonderful ad system

Ratings system on the way

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:14:19 +0100

Project Wonderful will, very soon, have an inbuilt ratings system for its adverts. This new feature will hopefully give publishers a way to automatically opt-out of adult-rated advertisements. It'll work the other way too, allowing publishers to rate their own websites so that your ads don't end up being shown anywhere inappropriate. This seems like a good complement to the campaign system, which - for better or worse - allows us to place control of our advertising budget into the hands of a pre-established set of parameters, reducing our need to make decisions on what sites are appropriate for our ads. Speaking of which, it's been quiet around here lately - how's everyone getting on with the campaign system? Do you still place many manual bids?

Something Positive joins Project Wonderful

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:49:21 +0100

R.K. Milholland has just signed up for Project Wonderful, and there's a banner spot at the top of Something Positive.
Minimum bid is five bucks per day, and adverts are approved by hand. Randy's letting the ad box run until the 15th on a trial basis.
This is pretty big. Here's hoping it pulls more advertisers into the system.

Text ads are now available

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 02:27:47 +0100

Project Wonderful now supports text ads! From the Welcome page: "Text ads are now available on our network, and we're doing them a little bit differently: with tons of sizes, options, and the ability to fit into our existing ad boxes (as well as display to readers who don't have JavaScript enabled, an industry first), these text ads are more powerful and more impactful than those that you'll find elsewhere. Give them a try! You can create text ads as you would any other ad by clicking here. "As a publisher, you can set the colours that text ads display with, as well as deciding whether or not to allow them on your ad boxes. Simply go to My Ad Boxes -> Edit Ad Box and explore the new options there! "In other news, our logo is now more excellent." Looks like the text ads are going through a testing period right now - line breaks don't seem to work, nor does highlighting or changing text size, and button text ads are as useful as a chocolate teapot. I'm using FireFox 2.0.0.6 on Windows - can anyone else successfully make a decent-looking text ad? **EDIT - the text links are now working properly! Woohoo!

Josh Fruhlinger interviews Ryan North

Mon, 28 May 2007 15:46:38 +0100

Josh Fruhlinger submitted this news via the "Contribute" link - thanks, Josh! Hello there Project Wonderful Talk! My name's Josh Fruhlinger and I run the Comics Curmudgeon Website (you actually bought some "Hosting for a Quid" ads on my site a while back)... I also am a tech editor/journalist type and I recently interviewed Ryan North for one of the sites I work for on the subject of Project Wonderful. We talk about the genesis and future of the site, as well as a little bit about how he runs it. The link is here: http://www.itworld.com/voices/voicesryan.html On that page, you can get to both a transcript of the interview and an audio file of the interview. Please let me know if you have any further questions! Josh jpw@jfruh.com

Hitting Five Hundred

Tue, 22 May 2007 01:29:45 +0100

At the start of this month, I passed the five hundred dollar mark for money spent on advertising via Project Wonderful. At this benchmark, here are my experiences from an advertiser's point of view. Most of the money I spent was to advertise hostingforaquid.co.uk, the business that quietly ticks over and pays most of my bills for me while I work on my more serious projects (namely website design via stainless-design.co.uk, and retro arcade machine rental/sales via an unfinished website that I'm not going to publicise just yet). Stainless Design is what earns my real money, while the arcade machines and hosting just provide a nice residual income stream that doesn't take up too much of my time. One or two other sites (including this one) had a tenner or two, spent via PW, to start them off. The money from those sites now goes into the pot to advertise HFAQ, and I view them (from a financial perspective, anyway) as ways to reduce my advertising expenditure while still getting a similar amount of advertising done. A little background on Hosting For A Quid, so the number-crunching that follows will make a little more sense - there are seven different packages, at �1, �3, �4, �6, �8 and �10 per month. That's only six prices - one of the packages has the same data transfer and storage limitations of the �1/month one, but the features of the �10/month one. It costs four quid a month and is the most popular package. Roughly half of the money that comes in each year is made up of monthly subscriptions, and the other half is made up of customers buying a year up-front. I also sell domain names, but the money I make on them is measured in pennies rather than pounds, so practically all of the money comes from the hosting. Five hundred dollars is, right now, about two hundred and sixty quid. Roughly two months' worth of my typical advertising budget, as it would be spent via Google Adwords - I've been rather conservative with trying out Project Wonderful, and I'm rather conservative with advertising in general. I've spread this out over bids since January, so I'm still spending a little less with PW. I'm continuing to advertise HFAQ via Google AdWords, and I don't think I'll stop using either service any time soon. The cost per click, as most PWT members will already suspect, has worked out to be a fraction of what Google asks - about one tenth, to be precise (web hosting is a ridiculously competitive market, so the keyword bids are through the roof). The conversion rate for the Project Wonderful campaign, however, is not so promising - only 0.4%, compared with 1.6% through Google (an average over the whole of 2006). Still, given that the cost per visitor is one tenth as much as Google, the conversion rate could drop even further than that and PW would still be performing better pound-for-pound. Reasons for this could include: * When I advertise via AdWords, people from the UK are already searching for hosting services, so I get them right when they want me to - they have more of a look around the site, and tend to convert better into customers. * The bulk of traffic coming from PW ads are from overseas, mostly in the USA - at a buck ninety to the pound right now it's hard for me to be terribly competitive in the US, where the webhosting market is even more saturated than it is here in the UK. Upon reaching the final phase of the checkout, PayPal converts the currency into the local amount and awaits the final confirmation that seldom arrives. * People click the ads on webcomics they like in order to support the creator, regardless of whether they're actually interested in my services - naturally leading to a ridiculously high bounce rate. * Although fewer visitors actually turn into customers, those that do tend to go for the higher-end packages - combined with PW's low prices, this leads to a higher R.O.I. (incidentally if this data is useful to you, they also tend to go for annual payments, rather than monthly subscriptions) The bounce rate is also a sight higher on the traffic coming in via PW - an average bounce of 68% from Google, and 81% from Project Wonderful. Four out of five people leave HFAQ immediately after following a Project Wonderful ad to the website. That's pretty atrocious, even considering that a lot of folks are coming in from overseas. However, even with all those drawbacks, the rock-bottom prices of Project Wonderful still make it a better deal than Google AdWords. For my �260-odd spent, I've got back just over three hundred quid in sales of annual packages, and an extra thirty quid per month from folks on a monthly subscription. Let's crunch those numbers a bit - my cancellation rate is less than two per cent, but let's be really generous and go for a worst-case scenario where the people who signed up via Project Wonderful have a much higher cancellation rate. Let's make that �30 into �20, and assume that a year from now I'll still be getting �20 a month from the �30/month worth of customers who found me via PW. So, taken from today and even disregarding the fees dating back to January (largely because I can't be arsed to work it out right now), that's �240 in a year. Add the customers who paid for a year up front, and it becomes �540, or about $1,060. A 100% annual return on investment, being conservative - it's almost like swapping dollars for pounds. Even though Google delivers more accurately-targeted traffic with a far higher conversion rate, it costs so much more that my return on investment in 2006, during which time I used AdWords exclusively, was around 35%. The immediate picture is that Project Wonderful is delivering traffic that isn't as useful to me as the traffic that Google provides - but it's delivering ten times as much for the same price. While using Project Wonderful is kind of like throwing mud at a wall to see how much will stick, enough of it does stick to make it a better target for my advertising budget than Google AdWords. At this rate, I think I might have to look for server co-location in the USA and start up something over there - I have no doubt that the conversion rate would be higher if my prices were listed in dollars. At any rate, I've been impressed enough with the return provided via Project Wonderful that I believe I may just sink a nice round British thou into it over the next four or five months - so if you see adverts for hostingforaquid.co.uk springing up on your site, don't be surprised. :)

Campaign system is now live!

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:58:05 +0100

In what could prove to be the biggest change in Project Wonderful's history, the "Campaign" system is now live. The new Campaign system allows you to place large amounts of bids in one set, by specifying parameters in the publisher search menu. You search for publishers as normal, and then click the "Create a new campaign" button and you're taken to the new campaign creation screen, which bids automatically on any ads that meet your search criteria. For the last couple of weeks, I and a few others have been beta-testing the campaign system, which is why you might have noticed strange-looking bids for Project Wonderful Talk on your ad boxes. My experience of using the campaign system has been top-notch - the overall cost per click for Project Wonderful Talk has been less than one cent. In other news, there have also been some updates for publishers - you can now set a minimum bid on your ad boxes, and if bids drop below that amount, replace the ad box with a link to another page. I don't know about you, but I for one will be watching Project Wonderful very closely for the next few days.