We’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.

It’s Christmas Eve, everyone!  That is exciting.  I wanted to wish you happy holidays and a most excellent new year – I hope the it brings you nothing but happy surprises and good times!

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.

Today, if you’re in a part of the world that observes it, is when Daylight Savings Time ends, and your clocks fall back by an hour. It’s a free hour of the day! Depending on how you look at it!

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.

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.

We’ve updated our help pages recently: gone is the open-source phpMyFAQ and replacing it is some homegrown software more suited to our needs.  Nothing against phpMyFAQ, as it is a solid piece of software, but it was never a perfect fit: our new software is perfectly integrated with the rest of our site and set up more like a book you can browse, with some wiki-like features added in.

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!

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.

Whoah, it’s been a while since the last post!  My apologies.

We’ve got a few new features up: new interactive charts and chart types, as well as an upgrade to our ad code.

The charts you’ve probably noticed: they’re what’s shown when you’re examining the performance of an ad box (or a bid, or an ad, or a campaign!).  They used to be static images – and still are, if you don’t have Flash installed – but if you do, they’ve been replaced with more interactive charts that let you get exact values for every data point.  Neat!

We’ve also added comparative charts, which let you plot the performance of, say, three bids on the same charts, so you can see at a glance how they’re performaning against each other. We’ve set up a page here, which walks you through how these new charts work. Enjoy!

The second new feature is a revamped version of our copy-and-paste code. This new code is simpler to install, but otherwise has all the same features. You can get it by going to “My ad boxes” and clicking on “Get code”. You don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want to, of course!

Why did we change our code? There’s a few reasons. The main one was that some platforms (Blogger and Wordpress, specifically) would try to get too helpful and would accidentally modify our code so that it wouldn’t work. This was not so good! Our new code is more compact and simpler, which means that it takes up less space on your website, and there’s less places where it can be modified. It’s also prettier to look at.

The new code also gives you the option of whether or not you want your ads to display to people who have disabled JavaScript: having it on means more people seeing your ad, but also larger code on your page. Most other networks don’t offer non-JavaScript ad displays, but we recommend it!

So that’s what’s new! Expect to see more frequent posts here in the future, and thanks for being a member of Project Wonderful.

This is neat. Over at Mashable.com I just came across this selection of advertisement friendly Wordpress Themes. check them out.

This tip is aimed primarily at our advertisers. Short version: by leaving standing bids on sites at below the market rate, you can get exposure on sites that you might not normally be able (or willing) to pay for.

One of the tenets of the Efficient Market Hypothesis is that the current prices of goods in a marketplace already reflects all of the information about their value. In other words, unless you know something no one else knows, you can’t consistently outperform the market.

At this stage in our lifecycle, the prices on Project Wonderful are probably not perfectly efficient, meaning that there are plenty of opportunities for eagle-eyed advertisers to get higher than average value for their advertising. Hindsight being 20/20 you can see this in our market information by comparing the movement of prices to the traffic that a site gets. A lot of our publishers are comics artists who publish 3-5 times a week. When you look at their traffic you can see the clear pattern as traffic grows on weekdays and drops on weekends. Often the prices do not match that same pattern, which is odd. If one of six buttons on a site with 50,000 visitors is worth, say $1.50 on one day, you’d expect that button to be worth the same amount on any other day with similar traffic.

Below is a portion of a sample chart from one of our members. I’ve superimposed the traffic stats with the movement of prices. You can see that generally speaking they move up and down in relation to one another, but that from time to time, they diverge. Pay particular attention to the area I highlighted in blue. People advertising on the 21st were paying just over half what you’d expect to pay on a weekday.

Why is this happening? There could be a number of reasons but one of them I suspect is that people aren’t making use of the features we provide to help you catch these moments. For the enterprising advertiser looking to capitalize on opportunities like this, we offer two approaches.

First, you can use the notification system and set up a search that will notify you when an ad box falls into your price range. For example, ads on the blog are going for $0.04 right now. If you ran a search for “sites with a URL like: blogjectwonderful.com” and then set the bid price at $0.01 then you’d get no results returned. But setting up a notification for that search would mean that the system would contact you if the price ever fell. Then you can log in and bid away.

For an even more automated strategy, consider leaving a standing bid on pages that you’d love to sneak on to from time to time. What this means is putting up a bid far below market price which you suspect the box might fall to from time to time. Then set it for some longer period of time (say a month) and let it go. Whenever the price dips, the system will start bidding for you and displaying your ad. When prices climb again, you’re no longer charged. In this way, you can take advantages of gaps in the marketplace where prices don’t match the full value of exposure on the site.

Happy bidding!

-Tim

I was reading this article on Wired about Google’s recent drop in share price which is probably due to new data showing that click-through growth is slowing down for Google’s ads. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in there about what this might mean (Google talks about generating less click-throughs due to changes that should hopefully increase the quality of those clicks) but one line in particular jumped out at me.

“It’s not clicks that advertisers are really buying, it’s what those clicks get them, which is sales conversions,” said Sanderson.

This is something that we talk about a lot here. When we decided to go with the CPD (cost-per-day) pricing scheme, our biggest worry was that potential advertisers or publishers wouldn’t get it. CPM and CPC are the default metrics used for measuring ad performance across the industry and a lot of people seem to get kind of obsessed with them. It’s understandable, they are easy metrics to grasp and very easy to measure. The risk is that in focusing on these performance metrics, you can forget that they are really only indirect measures of success.

The only metrics that really matter to an advertiser should be CPS or CPF (cost-per-sale or cost-per-fan). CPC and CPM can help you to begin that analysis (which is why we offer both of these statistics as part of our analysis tools) but unless you complete the loop by analysing how many those displays turn into successful transactions (whatever that means for you), you haven’t really learned all that much.

-Tim