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.

[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

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

Matthew Skala has an interesting post on Project Wonderful on his blog. Inside, he talks about the economy of Project Wonderful, addresses the concerns we've all had about the widening gap between big-time and small-time publishers, and suggests some options for remedy:

If you've been following my adventures trying to advertise my Web comic, you'll have heard about my misadventures with Google, and more recently the collapse of my Project Wonderful ad box bids. My thinking is that this may be a structural problem with Project Wonderful - it's set up in such a way that when someone like me starts lowering bids, that causes other people's income to drop and then they lower bids too and the whole thing can spiral out of control, leading to ridiculously low bids and a non-awesome situation all around.

For the full article, head over to mskala's blog.

Project Wonderful has been featured on ClickZ.com.  Nifty!  This is important because ClickZ.com is a pretty major marketing and networking site, and talk about Project Wonderful could attract more outside interest from advertisers.  And getting more non-webcomic advertisers into the system is good, as they tend to have lots more money...

Here's the link.  Check it out!