Project Wonderful

[Rob]

It appears Project Wonderful is going through a bit of a face lift right now. They are changing the way searches are done and the way a lot of the data is presented.

As usually it's made the site slow and buggy as hell.

Just FYI for those of you with campaigns and stuff going on right now... this might not be the best time to be using the site (or spending your money there).  ;)

[Gibson]

Kind of like McDonald's cash registers, they're replacing everything with pictures. For those of us who are literate or at least not big fans of Pictionary, it's making things confusing. Also, they've added something that I think is grossly insidious...a WIN button that makes you the highest bidder automatically.

I haven't been a fan of any of the changes PW's been making over the past year.

[Nuke]

The extra pictures are a little annoying, and the load times seem slower, but it is kind of nice to see the metrics right on the bid page without clicking to get to them.

"Buyout" and "Max bid" buttons are good for people selling adspace, so I'm not gonna gripe about that one :)

[Rob]

I have found that the site is functionally broken in Chrome (which I love) so I've had to load it up in IE (which I detest) just to get all the boxes and whatnots to appear so I can actually use the site.
:P

[Gibson]

Why aren't you using Firefox?

[Rob]

Because Chrome > Firefox.  ;D

[Gibson]

Your math is also broken.

[Gar]

Firefox is still better than IE though

[JR]

A sick kangaroo is better than Internet Explorer.

I'm a little distressed about all the negative reviews on PW recently.  I was finally ready to start using it.  Is it still a worthwhile venture to get into?

[wendyw]

A sick kangaroo is better than Internet Explorer.

It's a good thing I put my drink down just before readig that because otherwise I'd be needing a new keyboard right now.

[Rob]

I think the internet as brought to you by a sick kangaroo would be awesome. LOL. :D

As for Project Wonderful... the site has always been a little buggy, a little steep in the learning curve. I think some of the changes being made are trying to address that but advertising the way they do it isn't a "simple" thing to grasp fully. It's nuanced and technical and requires experimentation. I'm going to write an article on my recent experience using them soon but I will say that it is definitely worth the effort. It's just that you have to actually put in the effort. The effort to understand how the system works, the effort to figure out ways around the sometimes user unfriendly controls and the effort to play around with the options until you find an advertising strategy that works for you.
;)

[Dragon Powered]

Here's my quick-take on Project Wonderful.

You don't use it to make money.  You use it to cross-promote.  Pretty much everyone I've spoken to who has a PW ad on their site uses the income from it to advertise on someone else's site through PW.  The income you get from PW is not nearly enough to actually pay for anything, unless you have mega-traffic.  Even then...

Most sites generate ad bids of 0 to around 40 cents per day.  How much does two dollars a month buy?  A McDonalds value burger or two dollars worth of in-kind advertising on other sites.  Even the really big sites that use PW certainly aren't making a living on it.  Dreamland Chronicles, for example, has a nearly 100,000 views a day and the current bid on one of their ads is $2.20.  It's a fantasticly well done 3D comic, but I'm sure that money would hardly even pay the server fees, much less support anyone.  Girl Genius is one of the most highly trafficked sites I know, with nearly 400,000 pageviews a day, and is an insanely popular webcomic.  Their top ad, at the very top of the site, generates about $25 a day.  Ads below the comic are going for 60 cents.

Project Wonderful is very friendly toward webcomics.  It's really designed for webcomics.  Just don't expect to make money with it.

[Rob]

DP, Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content is easily pulling in $100 a day or more on adverts from PW. Granted he is THE biggest site on PW but the point is, if he can make over 35k a year just off Project Wonderful you can't say that it's only good for more ad money.

Many of the bigger sites don't advertise at all on PW and just soak up the cash. Plus, you have to remember that the bid you see under the ads, or when you click on them to go to PW only show the American (or whatever country you are dialing in from I assume) bid. If you click through all the countries you will see that often they are making a good chunk more on the other regions.

For example when my American ad space shows 4 or 5 cents but I'm making 1 or 2 more cents in the other three regions it changes my take from 4 or 5 cents to nearly ten. I've seen bigger sites getting 20-25 dollars on the American ad and then pulling in another 10 -15 in the other regions for a respectable amount of cash generation. Just $30 a day results in well over 10k dollars a year. A nice little take if you asked me.

I totally agree that for the most part PW is just cross promotion. But the bigger sites, anything over 30k in unique traffic or so, have the potential to make some good coin.

[Gibson]

Well, Girl Genius is more popular than most webcomics, it's true, but it is far from the most heavily trafficked, and the $25 you were seeing yesterday was probably only the American bid and not including bids from three other regions, which is how PW works now. When I looked at it a few minutes ago, that ad space was bidding at more than $50 for all four regions, plus there was another ad space at the bottom pulling in another $8. That's certainly not an insignificant amount of money, especially when you consider there are other non-PW ads on the site, and that they have a store.

You're right that very few webcomics can make a complete income on PW alone, but it does make for a considerable chunk of it for a lot of the bigger ones, and that's the point of it. You can't make a living off the ads alone just like you can't make a living off print volume sales alone or merch alone. It's the nature of our business that we seek revenue from a variety of sources.

With all of that in mind, though, it is WISE for comics that don't make much money off PW to use it for cross-promotion, recycling it back into itself. That's what I do, that's what most folks I know do, and it works. None of that, though, really has anything to do with the current functionality of the site.

PW keeps changing itself, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they've taken something that worked and started tweaking it every few months, adding cute little widgets and icons and making it so top-heavy that it gets harder and harder to do with it what I want to do with it. I'm on the PW site a lot, maintaining my ads and my ad spaces. Every few months, just when I've managed to figure out the last batch of "upgrades" to their site, they change things. There have been at least four different iterations of the site in the last year, and in my eye none of them have been a significant improvement over the version they're replacing. The most recent thing has made it far more visually confusing for me, and made the functions I use harder to find.

[Gar]

Um...how reliable is the PW stats tracking? I just started advertising a little under two weeks ago, and according to their chart yesterday's traffic was nearly 5,000 uniques above when I started (a 1,000% increase). It's weird because I added up the clicks from all my ads and it totalled to under 500  ???

Someone posted a link to a traffic analyser a while ago, but I can't find it now. I need to double check this. Something's either Very Wrong or Very, Very Right.