Project Wonderful and Keeping a Schedule

A while ago the people over at Blogject Wonderful did some number crunching to see what they could do to get bids up. Their research is rather basic. They took what appears to be either a webcomic or blog which updates Monday-Friday, and they noticed that it keeps a fairly standard rate on M-F, that rarely dropped below its standard rate. Their article focused on an advertisers point of view, using long term, low priced bids means that every once in a while you win the spot, when the other advertisers miss a day for some reason.

Theres an extension of this information that they didnt seem to consider. In fact, the main tenets of this theory they seem to have taken for granted, and not investigated at all. This assumption is fairly simple: there are two different types of bids, which are generally placed by different types of people, who are aiming for different types of advertising campaigns. If youve used Project Wonderful as a publisher, you will have noticed them, and their basic trends.

The first type of advertiser I like to call the Spike advertiser. They, like their name implies, causes the spike in box value that so many people criticize when talking about Project Wonderful. They will place high priced, short term bids on ad boxes, usually placing them on a number of sites at the same time. The goal of their campaign is to get as many people to their site in a short amount of time, and theyre willing to pay a premium price for that. In general, these are the people who will want your ad box when you get the most hits, and since you want the most money possible, you (as a publisher) will want to give it to them.

The other type, which the Blogject Wonderful article focused on, was the Frugal advertiser. They dont care about immediate returns, at least not nearly as much. Their main concern is getting the best deal. To obtain this, they will do precisely what the article describes: theyll place low priced, but long term bids, in the hopes that at some point in the future the ad box value will hit that price for a short period of time.

Think about this for a minute. If youve got one type of bidder who is only making minimum bids, and another is making higher bids, you want the two types to compete against themselves, not each other. In order to do that, you want to consolidate as many of those Spike advertisers onto certain days, if you get a concentration of them all bidding at the same time, theyll drive each others prices up, instead of simply bidding a little over what the Frugal bidders are doing.

This leads to a definite problem. The best thing for you is to get as many Spike advertisers competing against each other, since that is how you will drive the value of the box up the most. The best way to do that is through traffic control. Its an inherent feature of Project Wonderful, because of the two types of advertisers, that there will be spikes in the value of an ad box. The key to this theory is making there be spikes in your traffic too. If there will inherently be spikes in the value of the box, and you create spikes in the traffic to your site, the price spikes will grow to match the traffic spikes. In doing that, they will grow.

In other words, if you want to maximize the money you make, you need to create differences in how much traffic you get on different days. Its all too easy to fall into what I like to call a bidding pit if you get consistent traffic. For whatever reason it is, Project Wonderful bidders seem to not use those sites as much. What you want, for optimal bidding, is updates. If you stick to an update schedule over time, your traffic will get used to it, and start following your schedule too. Youll see an obvious increase on days when you update, and significantly fewer hits on days when you dont.

Keep in mind the way traffic to a blog/webcomic works. On an update day, as long as you stick to a schedule, you will see several times the traffic you get on a non-update day. Because youre getting so much more traffic, those are the days that the Spike advertisers will focus on, and those will be the days they will on compete for. The bottom line is simple: If you use Project Wonderful, stick to your schedule. If you do, youll see nice profits. If you dont... Well, lets not talk about that.

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