New features for the new year!
January 6, 2009 10:28 am announcements, new featuresWe’ve just rolled out a ton of new features to make Project Wonderful easier and more useful for you, our beloved members! Here’s a short list of the highlights:
- Ad box categories: Every ad box now belongs to a category, like “Webcomics”, “Handmade”, or “Games and Gaming”. These allow advertisers to find your site easily, and makes targeting vertical niches a snap. As a publisher, you can use tags to further categorize your site! As an advertiser, these categories allow you to target your advertising like never before. Want to advertise only on webcomic sites? Sure! How about humour and music sites that get over an average of over 10000 hits a day and are bidding below $5 a day right now? NO PROBLEM.The tags assigned to an ad box still exist, but are now mainly used for subcategorization. For example, in the past, if you wanted to find comic sites, you’d have to enter a tag search with tags like “comic comics webcomic webcomics”, and you’d still miss some. Now you can just search the category webcomics, and use tags for themes, like “action”, or “comedy”. The future is now, my friends!
- A simplified search page: You can actually do more (like finding sites that don’t have certain tags), but the interface has been made simpler and much more intuitive. Options you’re not using are tucked away, but can still be found with a single click.
- A revamped bidding page: It’s now easier than ever to bid, and your bids can last indefinitely. And rather than having to choose a set end time, you can now also enter in the number of days you want your bid to last. Simplification!
There are various other interface improvements made throughout the site, including the pages used to modify your ad boxes and campaigns, which have been simplified and clarified. We’ve got other improvements planned throughout the year. It should be a good one!
Thanks for being Project Wonderful members.
January 6th, 2009 at 11:47 am
The categories update rules.
January 6th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I realize that this is probably very very much a nontrivial tweak, but would it be possible to be able to assign more than one category to a site? For instance, you guys categorized my site in the “Comics and Manga” category, which is perfectly correct, but it would ALSO be perfectly correct to put it in the humor category, and OH MY GOD WHAT IF I AM MISSING OUT ON THE HUMOR ADVERTISERS, you know what I’m saying.
I hate to gripe because Project Wondeful is in general awesome and I love it and you! But it is a suggestion to consider.
January 6th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Hi Josh, and thanks for the suggestion!
Right now we’re using the tags as a way of adding more detail to the categories, so you could be categorized “Comics and Manga” and then add the tag “humor” and “comedy” and “laffsahoy”. On the other hand, an (excellent!) site like yours is really on the boundry, so you may want to put yourself in the “Humour” category and tag yourself “comics”.
When advertisers search they can choose more than one category to look at, so they could look at both “Comics and Manga” and “Humour” sites at the same time, if they have an advertisement that would fit them both well! This helps to minimize the “OH GOSH WHAT IF I’M IN THE WRONG CATEGORY” fear. As long as your category is reasonable, you should be in good shape.
January 6th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Hi Ryan!
Thanks for the quick response! Excellent advice, I shall take it.
I approve of the fact that you’ve spelled the “humour” tag all Canadian-y, by the way.
January 13th, 2009 at 2:11 am
I’ve been interested in PW basically from the moment it appeared, big fan of the whole idea, so when I set up my new site last year I wanted to put PW ads on it. After a couple months work I signed up, then clicked “become a publisher” and found out sites had to be *approved* first. As it was coming across a bit sketchy at the time, I figured I should do a bit more work on it first. Ended up several more months’ worth.
It’s not a “site about X”, just “my site”, with a wide variety of things there and in planning, which also didn’t help the appearance for if it was to be judged. I finally submitted it yesterday though, hoping the ready parts wouldn’t be undermined by the unready parts or those parts I never even planned to put ads on at all. At the same time I saw the news about categories, which I was in 2 minds about. And in looking for more info whilst nervously awaiting judgement, saw this blog entry today.
It’s sounding quite a bit like you’re saying that *you* guys are the ones who pick the categories, and much worse for people like me, that it’s *one* category *per site*, not just per ad box? As I really wanted to have separate boxes per section, targetted to different groups, that would be a disaster for my site, and the idea is making me feel very gloomy on top of the tension from waiting for approval.
As for the idea in general, I think that like other PW search criteria, some advertisers may well fluff it if they aren’t given prominent advice about the different ways it could be applied, which would *also* be bad for many publishers too. If everyone uses it well it could be pretty good though.
January 13th, 2009 at 4:18 am
Hi Tom -
When you apply, you’re approved at the site level: so if you’ve got a site with a variety of things, you can create ad boxes on your site for these different sections, and each can have a separate category.
We picked the initial categories, but when that happened an email went out saying “Hey, here’s what we chose, and here’s links to change the categories if you want!” Publishers can change their categories at any time.
So to answer your question: if you’ve multiple ad boxes per site, then you can have different categories for each of those ad boxes, as targeted as the sections on your site are. And of course, you’re in charge of the criteria.
I hope this helps!
January 21st, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Hi, I promised to share my reaction. I like to road test everything for a while before deciding, but so far everything seems like a positive move, and I think new users will learn the ropes more rapidly, meaning they won’t be functioning half blind for months. Definitely no complaints.
I’m sorry that sounds so bland, but it probably means that everything is going to work out well.
Best,
Bengo
Now where the hell is that SUBMIT COMMENT button!?!?