Well, if you’re not looking for further justification, it looks like I’m not going to be able to convince you. All I can say is give it a try when it launches, and I’m pretty certain you’ll be (pleasantly) surprised.

Thanks!

If you’re going to divide it, at least do it according to the publisher’s traffic. If the traffic receives the majority of their traffic from North America, then divide it into the US, Mexico, Canada, etc, and Other. Consider the publisher’s largest regions and let them capitalise on it.

Your new setup will create a lot of redundancy, and one of the following will occur:

1. The publisher will just switch geotrageting off.

2. The publisher will grin and bear it.

3. The publisher will find an alternative solution.

One reason Project Wonderful itself doesn’t have many “outside” and large advertisers is because they’re distanced by your system as it currently stands (US dollars, PayPal only, near-to-no advanced statistics). By segregating it and clustering everything other than the U.S. and Canada into an “other” junk bin, you’re further alienating advertisers from those regions and limiting your chance of growth.

To return to my initial point; Canada and the US are virtually interchangeable when it comes to marketing. I say this with a lot of experience and as a veteran of the industry. Your average Project Wonderful advertiser doesn’t have an office in Canada as well as the US, since the markets are so close and so similar (in fact, I’d wager that the average Project Wonderful advertiser doesn’t even have an office at all). And since they’re advertising on Project Wonderful already, they’ve proved that they clearly don’t care about reaching a Canadian or two when serving ads to the US, for reasons mentioned in my previous comment.

Your advertisers are going to be far more concerned about reaching our heritage country (my other example which you seemed not to notice), since not only do far more people live there, but they spend more time and money online, their product prices/releases are completely different, their marketing approach is extremely different (less in your face, more subtle), and they’re extremely accessible. Your average Project Wonderful advertiser who works on a professional level (i.e. they’re a business with employees and an interest in reaching more than a single region, which is what this update is all about), likely has operations there in some shape or form.

Referring to your “we’d received quite a few requests for US/Canada” stance: it’s great that quite a few members suggested it, but your members aren’t always right. As Herbert Bayard Swope said, “I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.”

I’m not the only person complaining about your choice of countries/regions and the way you’ve grouped them. I have friends who work in marketing (some higher up than others, and somebody who I’d consider to be one of your largest and most professional advertisers), and we all talk.

I’m sure you’ve done your research, but I think you need to take this back to the drawing board, and then test it privately with a small focus group to discover its strengths and weaknesses, rather than suddenly mindlessly implementing it as soon as it’s ready.

I’m not looking for further justification. Please; either do it right, or don’t do it at all.

I appreciate the sentiment! But we didn’t pull these markets out of nowhere. We chose these initial regions by looking at two things: where our traffic is coming from – which breaks down into where our publishers are already reaching – and where our advertisers are targeting.

US and Canada make up a large amount of our traffic. It would make sense to group them together, except for the fact that for many advertisers, it’s still an important distinction. Most companies operating in both countries have separate advertising budgets for them, and the Canadian division is not allowed to advertise in America, and vice versa. We also found some other legal restrictions, where for example if you’re running a contest in the States, it may actually be illegal for you to show the contest advertisement to non-Americans, who can’t take part in the promotion.

Scenarios like that make it sensible to separate out American traffic from the rest, which helps to leave Canada as a separate entity. As we move forward and get more advertisers and publishers in the countries you mentioned, it will be relatively simple to add them as new regions, separated out from the “everywhere else”. However, at the moment, we don’t have the reach into China or Japan – the two examples you mentioned – to make separate regions make sense. The traffic just isn’t there yet, nor are the advertisers – despite their population on the planet. To put it another way, the deciding factor wasn’t population on the planet, it was population on the planet that’s using Project Wonderful. Before we’d announced this change, we’d received quite a few requests for US/Canada geotargeting – outweighing the requests we received for geotargeting in every other country on the planet.

I hope this gives a little justification of where we came from! And as I said earlier, it’s always possible to add more regions in the future, just as we’re adding these now.

Canadians represent 0.4% of the world’s population. According to a recent study, they also spend far less online than the average American. Why on Earth, other than being a Canadian company (which is something we both have in common), have you selected this minute population over such markets as the U.K. (biggest online spenders), Japan (almost 1/2 of America’s population), or China (1.4 bl residents)?

Perhaps you should group the markets into North America, Europe, Asia, and “rest of the world.” At least that way it makes more than an ounce of sense whilst remaining extremely basic.