Publishers: Don’t worry if your new regions are empty right now. All your bids are still there in the US region, earning just as much as they did yesterday! The new regions will be filled up over the next few days as advertisers start bidding on them.

Advertisers: This is a great time to start bidding on these new regions! It’s a new advertising territory just WAITING for you.

I think that’s it! Thanks again everyone for being a Project Wonderful member. You guys are great!

Project Wonderful will be running over the holidays, of course, but responses to customer service questions may be a bit longer than usual, and if you’re applying to become a new publisher, the wait there may be a bit longer than usual too.

Thank you all for being members! More rad features are on their way soon, which we’ll be talking about here in early January. All the best!

You can learn the full details here: https://www.projectwonderful.com/whythewithdrawalcharge.php, but the short version is as follows.

PayPal recently changed their fee structure so that fees are charged more often to more people. These fees were significant enough that they could make a noticable impact on the money you earn from us. By using an alternate way to send money through PayPal (the “Mass Payment” system), we can ensure that no fees are applied to your funds, but by doing so PayPal charges us up to $1 per withdrawal. As such, there’s now a $1 charge on each Project Wonderful withdrawal: if you withdraw $100, $99 will arrive in your PayPal account.

The good news is that, in most cases, this $1 fee is actually lower (and sometimes significantly so!) than the fees PayPal would charge to you otherwise. For example, on $100, PayPal would otherwise charge $4.20 in fees, over four times our $1 charge!

We encourage you to check out the (pretty in-depth) explanation of how these fees affect your account, but the bottom line is that with this change, more money is now arriving in the PayPal accounts of most of our members. For withdrawals of less than $20, the new fees are slightly higher, but you can always hold off on withdrawing for a bit until you’re at a level where the new fee structure saves you money.

Plugin Wonderful is a fantastic way to add Project Wonderful to your WordPress themes. Thanks John!

John Bintz to the rescue! John, who ALSO does the all-ages adventure comic A Moment of Clarity, wrote a WordPress plugin just for Project Wonderful: Plugin Wonderful. Just install this plugin and you can drop Project Wonderful ads onto your site with ease. SWEET.

You can download the plugin here!

John’s other development work includes ComicPress Manager, the much-praised administration plugin for the ComicPress suite of WordPress themes. So what we’re saying here is that his work has an established track record for quality. Thanks John!

and when you’d click on that yellow “ending” text, you’d get something link this:

Pretty simple, right? We thought so too, until we discovered this one interface element caused a small market drop 12 times a year.

The issue is that most bidders don’t really care when their bid ends. Some do, of course (which is why it’s great to have this feature), but we discovered that when most bidders would choose an expiry date, they’d use approximates, saying things like “I want this bid to last about 2 weeks” and select a date appropriately. So far so good. But rather than always choosing a day about 14 days away, the date bidders would choose was being influenced by the interface.

Let’s say it’s the 15th of March. Our bidder, wanting his or her bid to last about two weeks, would most likely click on the last day of the month, the 31st, since that’s pretty close to his or her goal of two weeks. One thing they wouldn’t do was click on the calendar once to move it ahead to April, and click again to select April 1st. Selecting March 31st instead of April 1st saves our bidder two clicks, and the two dates are both close enough to being two weeks away from the 15th that it’s not really worth the hassle.

You may see where we’re going with this!

Now let’s say it’s the 16th of the month, and we’re in the same scenario. Our bidder is again most likely to select March 31st, since it saves time and clicks, and while it’s not as close to two weeks away as it was on the 15th, it’s still a pretty good fit. And as days go by, this bidder keeps selecting the 31st of March as their “two weeks away” point until we’re so close to it that it’s not a reasonable approximation of “two weeks away” anymore. At this point the bidder either thinks “Ah well, one week is enough” and again selects March 31st, or they bite the bullet and click twice more to select a later date in April.

The result of this was that we would see a spike in expiring bids at the end of every month. This was less than ideal for publishers, because at the end of every month all these bids would disappear en masse, and bid prices would drop across the board. Of course, that meant prices were cheaper for advertisers, but as we’ve seen recently in the world economy, a stable market is often preferable to one with drastic changes in it, even if this volatility is somewhat predictable. It would usually take a day or two to push prices up to where they’d been before the month ended.

Our new interface is similar, with an important difference: if you want to enter in an expiry date (and you don’t have to), you now have two ways of expressing this. The first (and default) way is to select the number of days (or weeks, or months, or years) that you want your bid to last. The second option is the one we discussed, with the pop-up calendar that allows you to choose a particular day. It looks like this:

What this new interface does that the old one didn’t is make the desire for efficiency we all share (some might call this “laziness”, but I disagree!) into a positive thing. If you’re there thinking, “I want this bid to last two weeks, and I don’t particularly feel like looking at a calendar to figure out what day that actually is”, this allows you to enter in the most important information (the length of your bid) without having to transform it to a date. The result is that bid expiries are no longer clumped around the end of the month, but happen throughout it instead. This means is a more stable and consistant market, which is good for everyone!

It goes to show you the importance of interfaces: even small things like this can have larger effects on the system as a whole. Normally improvements to our pages like this one are made without this sort of post to go with it, but it was really interesting for us to discover what was going on, why, and to redesign (and test, and redesign, and test, and redesign) the page appropriately. I hope you found it as interesting as we did!

• 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.

Our offices are shut down for the holidays but will be open again on January 2nd.  If you’ve applied to become a publisher, the turnaround time on approval may be a bit longer than normal.  And support may be a bit slower during this period, but you’ll still get a response to your email!

All the best.

One question we’ve never gotten – which has always been kind of surprising – is how DST affects Project Wonderful: we charge in terms of time, so aren’t people getting a free hour of advertising when we fall back, and isn’t an hour of advertising disappearing when we spring forward?

The answer is of course no: all temporaral calculations on Project Wonderful are done in terms of “Unix time“, which is the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st, 1970. This may sound weird, but it makes a lot of things in computer science easy, including DST. Since Unix time measures the number of real seconds since this date, it’s not affected by changes to the clock: when we leap forward, we aren’t gaining an hour in any real sense. The second after the leap forward we’re still only one more second away from January 1st, 1970, and that’s what Unix time records.

I recommend checking out the linked articles on Daylight Savings Time and Unix time! They’re both really interesting, and there’s so much history and controversy and trivia behind DST that you might not expect.

Questions are organized into categories, which are themselves organized, so you can see the context of each article you’re reading, and also see related articles on the same theme. Of course you can search for articles as well, but this new help system should make finding the information you want easier, while also making the system less daunting to new members!

Behind the scenes, there’s some exciting management features, like recording the most common search terms people use that don’t result in an exact match: this way we can see what we’re missing that people want, and add it into the database!

You can check out the new help system here. We’re adding new articles to it all the time, and one of the most popular new articles is the one titled Which sites can I put Project Wonderful ads on?, which explains our publisher standards in some detail. If you’re thinking of applying to become a Project Wonderful publisher, it’s worth checking out!