Project Wonderful?

I have now been advertising with Project Wonderful for a little over a week so I feel I can speak with some clarity about my experiences with it. First off let me explain what it is for those who don't know. This is the explanation on their homepage:

"Project Wonderful reinvents online advertising. We've made click fraud impossible. We give advertisers the power to choose what sites their ads appear on - and publishers the freedom to choose what ads show up on their sites. We don't have absurdly high minimum-payout levels. We've made the entire online advertising experience transparent, trustworthy, and fair - as well as more profitable, for everyone involved! It's why our slogan is "Everybody wins."

Basically the way it works is instead of paying per click like most adverting venues you make a minimum bid for how much you are willing to pay to have your ad on that site. If you are the highest bid at that time then your ad is up. If someone outbids you than you are off the site unless you raise your bid. You can pay as little as $0 if no one else is bidding or as much as that website can garner.

There are a lot of handmade and fashion blogs that are publishers, that is what they call sites you can advertise on. That is primarily what I was looking at but I did branch out into the art category some as well. I started out with $10 in my account. You can pay as much or as little as you choose and you can take it right out of your paypal account. I was looking for free sites to start with and found a few but I will say that the search methods are not my favorite feature on there. I had trouble finding exactly what I was looking for but sometimes that's a good thing because you find things you didn't know your were looking for.

My best ad was on a high volume fashion site and I received over 20 clicks in a day. I had many duds that received 0 clicks. I primarily picked them out by hand and set very conservative bids. If mine was not the highest bid at the time I was ok with that, and sometimes it would eventually get there. I would recommend setting it not to e-mail you with updates. I didn't do this at first and I was bombarded with every little update on when I was the highest bidder or when I had been outbid on every single site. That was more information than I needed or wanted to know.

At my peak last week I was running around 15 ads and paying an average of around .10 per ad. The most I paid was $1 a day for the fashion site I mentioned with a very high volume of readers. I started what they call a campaign as well. This is where you give them an amount you want to spend and some general categories and they manually set the bids for you and choose the sites. This was the biggest failure. I put a limit of $1 on each bid but forgot to set a limit for the day and when I went back to check on it 8 hours later I had already gone through $7 with very little pay off. I wasn't really thrilled with the sites it chose for me and it looked like many of them were either abandoned or hadn't been updated in awhile.

I will be sticking with it but I plan on doing all my own bidding, sticking to conservative bids and very targeted sites. I have found a few etsy related sites that have fairly low starting bids and will be reaching my target market of buyers already familiar with etsy. I will also be willing to pay more for some of the higher volume sites that will open me up to different markets. I will be setting some sort of advertising budget for each month that I will be working with. I will spend less in the summer, expect for maybe some Aussie sites where they might be looking for scarves, and will start to raise my budget as it gets closer to the Fall next year.

I'm also going to experiment with putting a few ads on my site. I like a clean looking blog and don't want to get it cluttered up with ads but I'm hoping I can get some ad money coming in to pay for my ads going out. We'll see how that works. I promise to keep them appropriate and hopefully thing you guys will like. Project Wonderful is nice enough to allow you to approve each ad that goes on your site. I'd love to hear other people's experiences with PW as an advertiser or publisher.

P.S. Thanks to all who expressed concern about my previous post. I'm feeling better today and I'm still sending positive energy to my brother and his girlfriend, who are dealing with the bulk of the major crisis. My mother is worrying way too much about it all which is not good for her and her heart so I'm hoping that everything gets resolved soon for everyone's sake.