Project Wonderful, Not so Wonderful


Project Wonderful logo

If you have been surfing around some blogs lately you have probably come across some blogs that are running Project Wonderful ads. They are particularly popular with people that are using Entrecard.

Like all advertising options the only way to know if something will work well for you is to try it, so I signed up and created an ad box on one of my more popular websites. The site gets regular traffic and generates 1000’s of page views a day. Google AdSense did not perform well on the site so I thought it would be a good candidate for Project Wonderful. Was I ever wrong. I had the ads up for just over two weeks. The grand total from Project Wonderful was .90 cents! The bidding never went up past .03 cents per day. I did better with the odd click from Google AdSense.

I was not very pleased with how the ads turned out from Project Wonderful for that particular site. I thought perhaps they are more targeted at blogs, since there seem to be several blogs running the ads and it was just a bad fit for the site I tried them on. When I changed the theme here I thought I would give Project Wonderful another try, on a blog this time. So far I have been less than pleased. The bidding has not gone up past .02 cents per day and I have had to cancel several bids because they were advertising adult content. I had the ad box set to only display safe for work ads but because hardly anyone on Project Wonderful actually rates their ads I was not getting any bids at all. If both ad spots will stay at .02 cents/day that would be a total of $1.20/month. That does not even buy me a coffee at Tim Hortons.

I did try running a campaign with Project Wonderful and as an advertiser you can get a lot of cheap advertising on a lot of blogs for next to nothing. In the campaign I setup I limited the cost per day to .01 cent and I was able to place advertising on a large number of websites across the network. The disadvantage is that my click through rate was horrible. Less than .05%. I would rather spend my money on AdWords and get less impressions but traffic that is more targeted. I suppose if you limited your advertising to certain websites and blogs you might do better than I did in running the campaign.

Overall I am not sure why Project Wonderful ads are currently so popular with bloggers. As a publisher there are better and more profitable ways of making money on your blog than as a publisher with Project Wonderful. As an advertiser you will get better value for your money using other advertising systems. I will probably leave the Project Wonderful ads up here for a few more days, as I am busy with other projects, but they will be coming down in the near future most likely to be replaced with private ad sales. If you would be interested in advertising here on the LGR Webmaster Blog feel free to contact me and we can arrange something.

Categories: website-monetization 
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