Advertising with Project Wonderful
Project Wonderful (PW) is a system that allows ads to be bought and sold as an auction. I first heard about PW over a year ago, but never gave it a second look until recently. The site allows you to host ads in real time at an auction format, so the higher bidders gets the ad. The neat thing is that if you’re really cheap, or maybe just dirt poor, you can bid as low as you want to advertise. I’m currently running PW ads on one of my other sites and I’ve noticed I’m receiving more advertisers than Entrecard (not that Entrecard is bad – I’m just sayin’.) 😎
Publishers:
The problem with online advertising today is that it’s mostly terrible. Click fraud is rampant and advertisers aren’t sure they’re getting value for their advertising dollar.
Project Wonderful changes that by reinventing advertising, replacing CPC (cost per click) with CPD (cost per day). Advertising is sold on the basis of time instead of clicks, which eliminates click fraud entirely, and stops an estimated $800 million in fraud dead in its tracks.
Read more on selling ads.
Advertisers:
Every bid you place is in CPD, which stands for “cost per day”. A bid of $1 CPD for a week means you’re willing to pay $1, per day, for one week of advertising. The most this bid will end up costing you $7: one dollar each day for seven days. (Similarly, a bid of $1 for 3 hours would only end up costing you at most about 12 cents, since it’s only for a small fraction of a day.)
Unless a minimum bid has been set, bidding starts at $0, which can mean free advertising for you! If your bid is at $0, and you’re the high bidder, you won’t pay a cent. And no matter what you’ve bid, if you’re the only bidder, you still won’t pay anything until another bidder joins in!
Read more on buying ads.
Conclusion:
I’ve immediately become a fan of Project Wonderful. The fact that I can set my own bids to advertise is a real plus. It makes the whole process exciting, kind of like sniping an auction on eBay. You deposit funds into your PW account using PayPal, which in turn enables you to bid on the site you’re interested in advertising on.
When it comes to hosting others’ ads, the process is pretty much the same, but this time you just sit back and see how high people are willing to pay to advertise on your site. Once an ad sells, you receive payment via PayPal.

January 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Coincidentally, earlier today I clicked on another site’s PW link to see what it was about, and intended to get back to it later. So thanks for your post, it’s given me a timely reminder! It definitely sounds like it’s worth giving it a shot, and I’m off to sign-up now. Good luck with your own projects;-D
February 20th, 2008 at 10:33 am
This makes me laugh. CPD is a total scam. Spend a month on ProjectWonderful and you will see you are paying for search engines and other very low quality leads on sites that have no ranking what so ever. Their system was a nightmare to use. Campaigns would not refresh. The CPD model means you’ll be out bid constantly and end up paying for ads to run only at early AM hours. We saw nearly 100% bounce rates because most of the leads were search engines and crawler. The same money spent on Google got less visitors but 43% of them stayed compared to none from ProjectWonderful.