I’ve put the Project Wonderful ads to bed after ten days of being on my site. The experiment netted me a grand total of just over $0.17. During this time period this site received close to 2,000 impressions and 1,000 uniques, so this is below 10% (probably below 5%) of the performance of AdSense for a comparable period of time. The only relevant advertiser on the site was Rob – he was getting a deal, but the rest were rather poorly targeted. In other words, a very neat system, but lacking a critical mass of advertisers to drive the bids up. That said, I now have a whole $0.17 to spend in Project Wonderful, to see how it drives traffic.
In the meantime, I’m testing Spottt, AdBrite‘s recreation of the old-school LinkExchange. Simple enough – you paste in the tag and Spottt shows ads on your site. For every ad you show, you get to show an ad somewhere else in the Spottt network. Beautiful if you’d rather have traffic than money (or realize that traffic comes before money.) I’m curious to see if Spottt fetches me any repeat visitors – if you subscribe to this blog because of Spottt, let me know with a comment.
If Spottt (and AdBrite) is smart, they’ll make the link exchange even more effective for its users by using the users’ self-classification to show Spottts only on sites with the same classification. Ads for tech sites run on other tech sites, and so on. This should boost Spottt’s effectiveness and usefulness – to the point where Spottt could start to play with the impressions shown to impressions earned ratio, and inject some of its own paying ads into the mix.
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