Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then
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Internet and Blogging by
Hari
Posted on Sat, May 23, 2009 at 13:28 IST (last updated: Sat, May 23, 2009 @ 13:49 IST)
As you can see from the banners on top of my website, I've been running Project Wonderful ads for around a week to ten days now. It looked a very neat concept in theory, but the reality is totally different as I've found out even within the short duration of running these ads.
I'm not going to explain in detail how the "infinite auction system" works, because you can read about it on their own site.
The idea, in theory, is that you set up ad boxes on your website at different locations, set a minimum amount for each of those spaces and watch as advertisers fall over each other to outbid one another to show their ads and make you money.
However, the reality is that, as a publisher you're forced to sell your ad space at a ridiculously low rate because of the gross disproportion between the number of publishers in the system who are desperate to go to any extent to get a few ads displaying on their website (for a couple of cents a day or even for free sometimes) and the number of advertisers who are actually willing to spend more than a few cents on advertising on your valuable web real estate. The cost-per-day concept is really great for people who are sick of waiting for clicks on their CPC ads, but frankly I don't think that this will work out to anything big unless the system is revamped and more money is brought into the system through decent commercial advertisers who actually have products to sell and can afford to spend more money on ad space. On a somewhat technical note, the Project Wonderful ad widget also seems to be totally out of tune with my real website traffic stats which is considerably higher than the graph displayed by their system.
Right now most of the advertisers seem to be bloggers, web-comic creators and small time authors or book publishers who don't really have a lot of money to put into advertising. It's also a fact that they also seem to be the biggest group of publishers in the system. In a nutshell, I have a vague idea that the same money in the system seems to be circulating around these ads without substantial investments from outside the system.
The other big issue with these advertisements is that the advertisers can cancel their ads at any time whatsoever (and they seem to do this most of the time within a few hours of putting their ads) and this way, you don't even earn a full-day's worth of advertising even if it's just one-tenth of a dollar. You can do your arithmetic and can easily understand that the nature of this kind of advertising benefits neither advertisers nor publishers. Advertisers don't run ads long enough to be effective on low-to-medium traffic sites (I doubt whether really high-traffic sites are the target audience of Project Wonderful) and the publishers earn in fractions of cents every time an ad is displayed for a couple of hours. I do wish that something is done about it by Project Wonderful. I've already written to them about it expressing my concerns.
On the positive side, the nature of the advertising is rather more pleasant (and artistic too, sometimes!) and less icky than the typical personal finances (credit management type) ads or make-money-online ads you see in other networks, the PW staff are very responsive in e-mails and extremely helpful in addressing any doubts you might have. Each e-mail is taken seriously and the staff actually read your mail in full and respond point-by-point to your queries or concerns as the case may be. Also their minimum payout is quite low ($10) and they do support the Paypal option, so international publishers can get their money rather more painlessly than waiting weeks for a mailed cheque. There is also a refreshing transparency and honesty about this kind of advertising that empowers publishers a lot more than the CPC model where a lot of factors are hidden and ambiguous both to advertisers and publishers and click-fraud can be rampant for higher-value ads.
Note that at the end of the day, I'm not going to recommend PW if you really want to make money through ads because they have quite a few issues to resolve and they will need to attract a larger pool of advertisers to get some kind of competition going. Until then, I doubt whether this model will be a serious threat to the big players in the online advertising industry.
However, I am going to give PW a fair trial before I either pull it off the site or consider it worthwhile.
It's fun to experiment with and quite an interesting way to discover interesting web comics if they're your cup of tea.
2 comment(s)
Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on Mon, May 25, 2009 @ 12:46 IST #
The lack of advertisers is what is really putting these networks down and I believe that the actual business model is viable if it is marketed in the right way.
CPC is great for the big publishers: people who play the volume game. For small websites which cannot get the critical "mass" of traffic, it's near useless is what I feel.
Comment by Hari (blog owner) on Mon, May 25, 2009 @ 18:11 IST #