Author and thinker Seth Godin had a recent post on ad clicks: the bottom line is that all ad clicks come from 16% of internet users, and most come from 4%.

What does this matter? If you’re optimizing your ads for clicks, you are overfitting your ads to appeal to 16% of the internet and ignoring the other 84%. It’s something to keep in mind when viewing your click performance stats, and one of the reasons we sell advertising based on time, instead of clicks or displays.

Here’s a great blog post by Pam that we came across, showing how you can build a great looking Project Wonderful ad (or any ad, really, though we appreciate she thought of us!) using only your browser and Flickr’s photo editing software, Picnik.

Since Flickr is free to use, this is a great option for members who don’t have or don’t want to install any photo editing software on their machines. Or maybe now you can capitalize on a few spare minutes at work…?

Thanks Pam!

We just rolled out some new updates to the network: mostly under-the-hood stuff, including security upgrades to prevent AJAX attacks. The most visible is that our old “you haven’t uploaded a member photo yet” image has been changed. We thought we’d give a bit of motivation behind the change here! It’s a small change, but it has interesting motivations.

It really comes down to polishing the member experience. The old icon was of a robot silhouette, in Project Wonderful blues, with the text “no photo has been uploaded” on top. Not bad, right?

There were a few issues with this that became apparent over time. One was that the image was often displayed at a 60×60 size: small enough that the text was hard to read, so you’d either skipping it or gloss over it. The other issue was that, when looking at search results, this default picture was in the same colours as an ad box’s category and size. It conflated important information (the fundamentals of the ad box) with more fun information (hey, it’s a picture showing me what the publisher looks like!).

The new image is a blue and white crazy face. It’s fun, it’s not easily confused with other information on the page, and there’s a lot of whitespace in it – which dovetails nicely with the “nothing particular has been uploaded here” semantics that the image is meant to convey.

So while it’s a superficially simple change, there was some thought and analysis put behind it!

“Today we’ve changed our fees slightly in order to save you money.” I’m sure you’re used to hearing sentences like that before, but in this case, it’s the truth! Project Wonderful withdrawals now cost $1, and we made this change to save you money.

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.

One of the major changes we’ve made to the bidding page (although it appears relatively minor on the page itself) is how bids end. Before when choosing an expiry date for your bid, you’d just click on the appropriate link, and a calendar showing the current month would pop up. You’d flip through to the month you wanted (assuming, of course, if you want the bid to expire on a day in the current month), choose a date and time, and you’d be good to go. It looked like this:

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!

Autosurfing sites are sites that will simulate traffic on your site, usually through an exchange: something like “for every 30 seconds you view one of the sites our members have submitted, another one of our members will view your site”.

The end result that autosurfs advertise is that your site gets Real Traffic Fast^TM, while the end result in reality is that your site gets a bunch of low-quality traffic from disinterested readers who are just running out the clock so that someone else will do them the same favour. They don’t work, but have an appeal to someone who wants to see their hits go up, no matter how it happens.

Wikipedia has a great article about them, with a few main takeaways:

• they don’t work
• they are often structured as pyramid schemes
• those that aren’t structured as pyramid schemes are often structured as Pozni schemes, and if money is involved, can actually be illegal
• the larger autosurfs, like 12DailyPro, collapsed under SEC investigation and legal troubles in 2006, but many are still around

So generally, they’re something you want to avoid. If you’re a Project Wonderful publisher they’re definitely something you want to avoid, as using autosurfs to inflate the page views of your site goes against our Terms Of Service, and will result in your ad boxes being deleted and your account being shut down. So just in case you’re tempted by the promise of “REAL TRAFFIC NOW” — we’d advise you to look twice, and do the research.

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.