Project Wonderful, one of the ‘time-based’ advertising services I recently wrote about, is now live in the sidebar. Approval took a little over a day.
Project Wonderful is made by the guy who writes the awesome Dinosaur Comics and like the comics it’s a little quirky. They support a popular 117×30 button as well as 125×125 square, a 234×60 half-banner, and some standard sizes: 300×250, 468×60, 728×90, and 160×600 units. All of these ad units are contained within ‘ad boxes’, which can hold multiple ad units of the same size – I could set up a row of six buttons or a 2×2 grid of squares or two half-banners side-by-side (or, for all I know, a 5×5 grid of leaderboards.)
Project Wonderful does give publishers an incredible amount of transparency and control. As a publisher, you can choose to approve every bid for your space one-by-one, to auto-accept ads you’ve approved in the past, to auto-accept new ads from advertisers you’ve approved before, or to auto-accept everything. You can also automatically filter out NSFW ads or all ads not suitable for all-ages. (I filtered out just the NSFW ads, but a couple were crass enough to still be worth declining.) You’ve got a lot of control over the appearance of the ad box as well, and whether you want the links to include the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
Once the ad box is configured, you’re given an ad code to add to your site template. Standard stuff (although the Project Wonderful ad code is the chunkiest I’ve seen, adding over a kilobyte to your page.) Once you’ve pasted in the ad code and activated the ad box in the interface, Project Wonderful sends a bot to your page to ensure accuracy and then puts your space up for auction. Although advertisers can search for your site by name, publisher-provided tags, or daily impressions, Project Wonderful also allows advertisers to set up ‘campaigns’ in which multiple ad boxes across multiple sites are bid on simultaneously. There’s a lot of advertisers on Project Wonderful who are looking for discount ad space and using the campaign system – so unless you’ve set a minimum daily bid for your space, you’ll get plenty of ads to review in a matter of hours. In my first day, I got more than thirty bids, ranging from $0.00 to the princely sum of $0.02 a day, for advertisements for everything from webcomics to coregistration offers to lead-gen for things like the ‘seduction bible’. (Passed on that last one.) Winning bids so far have included a P2P music sharing service and a WoW gold farmer’s site.
I’m curious to see if bids will go up slightly over time – the ad code for Project Wonderful tracks impressions, which are made available to potential advertisers. (See mine here for an example.) However, a cursory look tells me monetization overall is pretty low. The largest publisher right now, a cute webcomic called Questionable Content, is averaging 663K page views and selling two square ads for $29.70 a day. That’s a sub-$0.10 CPM. The highest CPM I could find when sifting through the large publishers was for a skyscraper at Something Positive, another webcomic – worked out to about $0.25 CPM for 188K of pageviews a day. Perhaps this is appropriate for webcomics publishers, but I would definitely test something like AdSense first if my goal was monetization.
I have to wonder if the low CPMs don’t stem from the cost-per-day auction dynamic – since advertisers aren’t guaranteed a set number of impressions, a click, or an action for their money, they’re less likely to bid. Perhaps there’s some good opportunities for advertisers available – I could see an education-lead provider making some money here, especially if they get a webcomic author to draw a creative and help style their landing page. I suspect the service works best as a quasi-link-exchange, with comics publishers looking to build traffic placing advertising on other comics publishers for low bids, and recouping their costs through the Project Wonderful ads on their own sites.
I’ll probably leave this one up for a few more days to see how the bids evolve.
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