I added a new forum today, explicitly for people saying "Bid on my site, please!"
It's a sad fact of life that the "Your Ad Here" buttons can't be styled with the rest of the ad box, so they look kinda out-of-place - even more so than actual adverts!  It's also a sad fact that there are some websites with very little traffic, who get overlooked by advertisers.  But if placing a $0.00 bid gets you a couple of hits to your site, it's worth doing, no?
In the new forum, people with "Your Ad Here" on their site can appeal to advertisers to place $0.00 bids on their websites, thus getting rid of the nasty "Your Ad Here" buttons and helping them on their way up the Project Wonderful ladder.
See the Forum for more details.

(Edit - the Bid Requests forum now has its own RSS feed!  Now advertisers can get notification of free advertising opportunities straight away - and publishers can get bids on their ad boxes fast!)

Yesterday, Project Wonderful got another update - this time, to allow publishers to automatically reject animated .gif adverts.  It came about because a lot of people had "No animated ads, please!" in their profiles.
As an advertiser, you should prepare a non-animated version of your ad to get the best exposure!

Since the $0.00 bids were altered and one-penny bids were introduced, we should hopefully see far fewer people battling over the free slots.  I think this is a good thing, as lots of folks (myself included) were spending far too much time trying to dominate the "free" market by placing zero-dollar ads on as many pages as they could.  But now you can get a whole year of advertising for $3.65, you have to ask yourself - how much is my time worth?

To keep Project Wonderful moving plenty of cash around, it's important to give advertisers plenty of choice - but to keep supply in proportion to demand.  If you're earning less than fifty cents a day on your site and you've been going for more than a month, you may want to use fewer ad boxes.
Each and every advert on your site is competing with the others on the same website, and if you have too many, then there's no good reason for an advertiser to make that all-important first cash bid.
Remember that most advertisers are looking for the best deal for the least money.  It's unfortunate, but true - nobody's going to just hand you a fistful of dollars for having a cool comic or blog, especially if there are a dozen button ads, a leaderboard and a skyscraper to choose from on the same site.
Competition is always a good thing, but you shouldn't compete with yourself!
It's hard to say what your ideal number of ads should be as it's going to be different for everybody, but as a general rule of thumb, if you ever see "Your Ad Here" images on your site and you're not earning any money, you could probably do with fewer ads.
It's good that advertisers have plenty of choice - but there's a big jump between giving them choice and flooding the market!

With a single click, you can now get a list of all the publishers with the highest page views available for bids at one cent or below.  Head on over to the "Buying Advertisements" section to see it in action.