Project Wonderful - An Adsense Alternative?

Project Wonderful Last week I finally dropped the Entrecard widget. Mostly because I felt the novelty of the service had worn out and the amount of work it needed was more than I was willing to invest. This made some space available which gives me the opportunity to experiment with different other services.

I'm currently trying Project Wonderful which is an advertising service promising to make “online advertising more profitable and easier for everyone involved”. Don't they all? :-)

The idea is simple. Ad spaces are sold using an auction model. Advertisers bid on a per day basis, not based on clicks. The highest bid gets the spot. They offer a broad range of ad formats which are very customizable. Publishers can manually approve ads or autoaccept them based on content ratings (eg. block NSFW advertisers).

Everything sounds just right. All the tools and statistics you'd wish for are there. But so far the whole thing isn't performing well for me.

Running Project Wonderful ads for about 4 days made me whopping 8 cents so far.

You currently get a day of advertising at splitbrain.org for as low as 6 cents a day. Even if the ad spot is not on the most prominent place it should be worth more than that. But I'm willing to try this for a little while to see how it works out in a longer term.

Did you try Project Wonderful? How did it perform for you? Can you recommend other Adsense alternatives I should try next?

Tags:: entrecard,; projectwonderful,; advertising

Similar posts:

Posted on Wednesday, March the 19th 2008 (23 months ago).

We've been advertising on a few sites using Project Wonderful for the past month or so. From an advertiser's perspective it's interesting. Some good deals, but there's a _ton_ of sites selling ad space but finding the good ones is tricky. It's nice that it's near instantaneous to get an ad placed, and you don't have to pay for a month's worth of adspace if you know after a week it's not worthwhile.

I'd give it a little bit. Having watched some of the more desirable sites that we've been bidding on it seems like it takes at least 2 weeks or more to attract the advertisers that actually want your site. One site that we star we started at $.20/day on is now $1.20/day.

2008-03-20 03:05:09

Brett

Brett, thanks for sharing your knowledge from an advertiser's view. You seem to be right about it taking time. Prices seem to go up slowly, as does the relevance of the ads. I'll be patient :-)

2008-03-20 19:28:38

Andi

Thanks for posting the link, I'm going to hang in there until the end of June and then see what rates my adspace is getting.

2008-06-03 03:16:24

Jane @ Kidzarama

Seriously, who would ever even see or click on that add all the way at the bottom of your blog? If you actually want anyone to bid on your site you have to give at least a little bit back to the advertiser. I don't bid unless it's above the fold and I expect most sane advertisers do the same.

2008-11-30 08:04:32

Nick

I've been a member for a while. I like it and it does do a good job. I especially like the way I can rate and filter ads to my site.

2009-04-05 00:22:36

Mar Matthias Darin

If you compute your CPM from, say, Adsense and gauge it against the default PW settings, it'll be greater almost by default. To help even things out and to better reflect market value, have you considered increasing your minimum bid settings for your ad boxes?

2009-04-08 00:12:12

Sam