Project Wonderful – Not So Wonderful?

I recently found ad network Project Wonderful because they serve ads to SheToldMe.com where I’ve spent a lot of time lately. (see comment by James the owner of SheToldMe below) TheInfoMine, which I just blogged about, has been advertising on SheToldMe with Project Wonderful.

Project Wonderful distinguishes themselves from google Adsense with an unusual model  that completely eliminates click fraud.  Rather than selling ads on a Cost Per Click basis they have a bidding system for ad space based on display time (somewhat of a cost per estimated views are sites are ranked based on views per day).  Advertisers bid for time on each site, with the high bidder at any given time getting the spot for as long as they are willing to pay top dollar.   They call this an infinite auction and describe it like this:

“In the infinite auction, the bidding never ends. So you say “I bid $1 for a week” and your friend says “I bid $5 for a day”, and your friend has won the auction - but only for as long as his bid is valid. After his bid expires, you become the high bidder and you’re now winning the auction!”

I think of advertising on Project Wonderful like buying a billboard for a month or a week.  Everyone knows the estimated traffic (on the highway or the website) and the cost is whatever you agree to.  An effective ad can bring you lots of business and an ineffective ad could get you nothing.  In comparison Google Adsense and Chitika are based on click through.  If your crappy ad does not attract attention it costs you nothing (and the publisher earns nothing too).

Project Wonderful sounds like an innovative concept, so I figured I’d check out how well it works exactly and review the ad network.

Problem #1:  I could not get the ad box design to work.  I finally gave up.

Problem #2: I’ve seen very few Project Wonderful ads out there in my extensive surfing of websites and blogs.  I really wonder how popular they are.  The few ads I have seen are for small sites with micro ad budgets.

Problem #3: The four ads served on the Project Wonderful homepage pretty much suck.  Two are the same ad and one flashes through confusing views too fast to read.   If they can’t get good looking effective ads on the Project Wonderful homepage, you have to wonder what they will serve to your site.

Problem #4: Bids start at zero.  If one advertiser bids zero and no other advertiser bids against them (or there are any gaps in time) the zero bid takes the space.  From a site owner perspective, you are taking up “valuable” advertising real estate and potentially earning zip.  From an advertiser perspective though, maybe one should go bid zero on every site in the network for a shot at free advertising.

Problem #5: I can’t tell you want the site is like from a publisher perspective because I submitted this blog for review and about a week later got this message:

“Thanks for submitting your site to become a publisher with Project Wonderful! Our website review process forms an assessment of a website using a variety of criteria. These criteria include, but are not limited to, suitable content, ease of site navigation, and the website’s potential value to Project Wonderful and the experience of its members.

Unfortunately your website, at http://www.innovativepassiveincome.com/, does not currently fulfill these requirements. However, if you would like to submit another website, you can do so at any time: just fill out the form available under “My Ad Boxes”. and we’ll be happy to review and consider your new application! Before you do so, however, we’d ask that you take a moment to look over our publisher standards, to avoid notices like this in the future. They’re available here:  http://www.projectwonderful.com/wecanhelp.php?id=32“

I looked down the list (linked). This blog does not contain any adult, hate speech or other sensitive content.  While some might disagree about the quality of my posts, there are well over 30 posts (they even accept new sites) and this blog gets regular updates.

All content here is 100% original and all posts are written by myself (1 guest post and several interviews aside).

Site design is “clean” without popup or popover ads (I hate those ads).  I don’t use double underlined links, click tracking relays, and other “anti-reader” tactics either.

I suspect, though they did not indicate, that InnovativePassiveIncome.com was rejected for having “Review” posts with affiliate links.  Absolutely I write review posts – like this one.   I write about passive income topics that  I hope are interesting to you the reader trying to create passive income opportunities.

Some sites I talk about do not have affiliate and referral programs, and some do.  If there is an opportunity to get a referral cut from helping readers build passive income streams, of course I provide a referral link – I would be a total hypocrite (and poorer for it) if I did not.  The blog is after all called Innovative Passive Income.

So far, I’ve never done a true “sponsored post” where I review a site or product for upfront money, although I’ve been investigating this concept a little since this blog IS about finding ways to set up passive income streams and I bet that my readers would be interested in learning more about sponsored posts.

As I said in the beginning, I tried to sign up to Project Wonderful mainly so I could review Project Wonderful for my readers after using it.   Maybe your blog is more suited to Project Wonderful than mine and you can navigate through the seemingly very high standards for your site to accept what appear to be crappy looking ads.

I hope that this review was helpful. Anyone have comments to add?  Have you used Project Wonderful?  What do you think of it?

Personally, I think Chitika would be a better more professional way to monetize most sites beyond Google Adsense.  Chitika is supported by big advertisers with deep pockets and it serves very targeted ads to search engine traffic based on the search terms used. I personally use Chitika on SheToldMe, and I plan to use it here in the future next time I do a site design update.

If you would like, I’ll refer you to Chitika as an Publisher (website owner/contributer to Chitika enabled sites) or Advertiser.  Just click on this banner to get started:

Tagged as: blog income, Chitika, Google Adsense, Project Wonderful, SheToldMe