We’ve been busy these past few months, upgrading the network behind-the-scenes for our newest feature: geotargeting!

What is geotargeting?
Geotargeting allows you to target your ads to different areas of the planet. If you’re selling a product to Americans, you can now make sure only Americans see your ads. Or Canadians. Or Europeans, if you want. It’s pretty awesome.

How does it work?
When a reader loads a page with a Project Wonderful ad on it, we compare their IP address with our geodatabase, which matches country codes to IP address. Then we show them the appropriate ad for their region!

What are the benefits?
There’s several. As an advertiser, you can target your ads more effectively than before. As a publisher, you get more revenue streams, as well as different and distinct audiences to sell to publishers. And viewers of websites get ads that are more relevant to them, so that’s good too!

What’s changing?
There’s a few changes: most of them under-the-hood, but several that you’ll see. Each bid will now have a region associated with it! When you bid, you can choose to bid on one or more (or all!) of:

• American traffic
• Canadian traffic
• European traffic
• or traffic from everywhere else!

Where’d these regions come from?
We looked at a few factors: where our greatest audiences were in, and what distinctions would be the most useful for advertisers. The US/Canada division is a big one, and one that had been most often asked for from advertisers on both sides of the 49th parallel. Europe is another large block, with “everywhere else” taking up the rest.

While this new geotargeting won’t allow you to target, say, particular countries within Europe or particular provinces within Canada, it does allow you to target these larger groups in a way that’s convenient, simple, and that makes sense.

When is it happening?
We’re rolling over on Saturday, the 30th of January – just before the end of the month. That evening, Project Wonderful will be upgraded, and the next day, the 31st, the last day of January, will be the first day of New Improved Project Wonderful, now with geotargeting!

This sounds complicated. Is it complicated?
Nope! We’ve taken a lot of time to make sure our interface is actually as simple as possible. And if you’re not interested in geotargeting at all (and that’s fair!) you can ignore it and bid as before: searching will work the same way, and if you want to bid $10 a day on a site, we’ll automatically (and intelligently!) break that into regional bids for you, behind the scenes.

What do I have to do?
Nothing!  After the rollover on Saturday, January 30th, you’ll be able to choose which regions you want your bids to be active in. Until then just sit tight, and be sure to come back here for more previews, tips and tricks about the new geotargeting features!

We’re announcing this feature well in advance for a few reasons: we didn’t want it to be a surprise, and we wanted all our members to be able to hit the ground running on January 31st. In the next few days we’ll not only show you what the updates look like, but we’ll be posting tutorials on how to bid with regions, tips and tricks on how to maximize your bidding, and so on.

Come back soon, and thanks for being Project Wonderful members!

(Oh – the sweet flag icons above were supplied by Icon Drawer – thanks guys!)

We hope you and yours had an awesome 2009, and here’s to an even more wonderful 2010! We’re living in the future now.

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!

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.

John Bintz announced today that the latest version of Plugin Wonderful is out. You can download it here!

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

When you’re doing web design, it’s always tempting to design for the most up-to-date browsers, but you have to remember that not everybody runs them. You can’t leave those folks behind. On the flip side, however, some folks are running browsers that are so out-of-date that to support them fully would mean crippling your website and leaving out a lot of modern functionality. So, there’s always a tradeoff!

We always try to make things as inclusive as possible. For example, our ad code is one of the few in the world that can gracefully degrade and display ads even to people who have JavaScript turned off. Recently, we added Ajax functionality to our bidding pages, which allows you to bid up and down in real time. Of course, if you’re not running JavaScript, these won’t work, but they fail gracefully: they direct you to a page explaining what JavaScript is and how to turn it on. And, as before, you can always use the simple “edit bid” page.

For something more modern like Ajax, you’ve pretty much always got to ensure that there’s a non-Ajax way of doing things. In other words, shiny new interface elements for those who can handle them, while everyone has the option of staying with the tried and true.

We also updated our bid status icons. Older versions of Internet Explorer had long-standing bugs in which alpha blending (the transparent parts of images!) would not be rendered properly: instead of “seeing through” the image, you’d see an ugly shade of gray. It wasn’t very pretty. As such, our status icons were in GIF format, which rendered properly everywhere but which were limited to 256 colours. With IE support of PNG images now working properly for a while, we’ve upgraded our images to PNG format, and tidied them up a bit while we’re at it.

Before (GIF format):

After (PNG format):

You’ll notice the new images have a much smoother border, with none of the “jaggies” associated with the GIF format. This is an example of the trade-offs mentioned earlier: members using old versions of Internet Explorer will still see grey backgrounds on these images, but these members are in a much smaller minority now, and the majority of members can now enjoy a prettier Project Wonderful.

(Any resemblance between the old “NSF” image on the right and Pickle Inspector from the critically-acclaimed comic MS Paint Adventures are entirely coincidental.)

Many of our publishers use WordPress as their content management system: it’s a convenient way to publish online. Adding our ad code to WordPress is generally pretty simple: just copy the code from our site and add it to your site’s appropriate theme files, and you’re good to go! The downside of this, of course, is that you have to be comfortable editing the source code of your WordPress themes, and not everyone is.

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!

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!