One of the most common questions we get at our customer service address goes something like this:

“Hi! I like your service, but I’ve noticed that many bidders cancel bids before they expire. Does that mean they’re ripping me off, because they don’t have to pay when they cancel a bid?”

The short answer is “No, as a publisher you earn money every second a bid is displayed on your site“. And as an advertiser, you’re charged every second your bid is the high bidder. These charges happen every few seconds and are credited (or charged) to your account automatically.

The longer answer is that, although we discuss advertising in terms of cost per day (ie: how much it costs to have your ad on a site for an entire day), bids don’t have to last a full day. We actually charge bidders every few seconds to the nearest 1/100th of a second, so there’s no way anyone can gain anything by cancelling a bid: it just prevents future charges.

For example, if someone bids your ad box up to $24 a day and sits there for an hour before cancelling, then we will charge them $1.00. On our site, the values we show are rounded to the nearest cent, but if you hold your mouse over the “current profits” number (if you’re a publisher) or the “current expense” number (if you’re an advertiser), you’ll see the a less-rounded version.

As most of you know, we do allow bidders (and publishers) to cancel any bid at any time. Often bidders will try out a site for a bit to see the performance. When a bid is cancelled, there’s no way anyone is gaming the system or not paying anything - they still have to pay for the time they were up. In addition, our campaign system will sometimes cancel bids as it manages the campaign: that’s probably where most of these cancelled bids are coming from!

But I’m not just posting this to clear this issue up. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made changes to the site to try to make this more clear to our members, but nevertheless, this question still arrives in our in box once in a while. Much less frequently, granted, but still enough for it to be noticable! I think it’s time to admit that maybe the word “cancelled” wasn’t the right choice: it has connotations of “undo” to it, a sense of “oh, wait, wait, I take this back”.

We’re considering renaming the “cancelled” status to something a bit more clear: “Expired early” is our current favourite, but we’re open to alternatives! If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, with our thanks. And you can expect to see the current naming of the “cancelled” status to be “expired early” in the near future.

Whoah, it’s been a while since the last post!  My apologies.

We’ve got a few new features up: new interactive charts and chart types, as well as an upgrade to our ad code.

The charts you’ve probably noticed: they’re what’s shown when you’re examining the performance of an ad box (or a bid, or an ad, or a campaign!).  They used to be static images - and still are, if you don’t have Flash installed - but if you do, they’ve been replaced with more interactive charts that let you get exact values for every data point.  Neat!

We’ve also added comparative charts, which let you plot the performance of, say, three bids on the same charts, so you can see at a glance how they’re performaning against each other. We’ve set up a page here, which walks you through how these new charts work. Enjoy!

The second new feature is a revamped version of our copy-and-paste code. This new code is simpler to install, but otherwise has all the same features. You can get it by going to “My ad boxes” and clicking on “Get code”. You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to, of course!

Why did we change our code? There’s a few reasons. The main one was that some platforms (Blogger and Wordpress, specifically) would try to get too helpful and would accidentally modify our code so that it wouldn’t work. This was not so good! Our new code is more compact and simpler, which means that it takes up less space on your website, and there’s less places where it can be modified. It’s also prettier to look at.

The new code also gives you the option of whether or not you want your ads to display to people who have disabled JavaScript: having it on means more people seeing your ad, but also larger code on your page. Most other networks don’t offer non-JavaScript ad displays, but we recommend it!

So that’s what’s new! Expect to see more frequent posts here in the future, and thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful.