Adding Project Wonderful to an established ad chain has been a topic of contention on many-a-forum that I frequent. Having been introduced to advertising already (in a series of 4 articles), you should know the terms I’m about to discuss here.
The first thing to understand is that if you’re going to put PW in an ad chain, it should be as the final default, or rotated in at a certain (lower) percentage. PW pays the lowest CPM of any advertiser, because it’s geared for cheap advertising rather than the generation of revenue. For example, I could advertise on a really awesome webcomic site for about 1 dollar per day. I might get…10,000 ad impressions that day! When you consider that average market CPM is 2-6 dollars, that creator of that popular comic is TOTALLY getting ripped off for those pageviews (instead of 1 dollar for that day, the creator should be making $20-60 at a 100% fill rate). But you, as the advertiser, you’re getting a really great deal. Welcome to webcomics!
Anyways. PW should always be at the end of an ad chain because you will make the least with it. Period. PW also doesn’t allow defaults, so there’s no use putting it up higher on an ad chain anyways.
The second thing to understand when adding PW as a default is that THE STATS GRAPH ONLY REGISTERS VISITORS AND PAGEVIEWS WHEN THE AD IS SHOWN! The stats are not inflated. The stats do NOT register the pageviews of all the other ads. So, publishers and advertisers alike: don’t think you are cheating bidders or being cheated! Advertisers will be bidding for the TRUE amount of pageviews registered.
The real question here is one of SHOULD. Should you add PW into an ad chain? I would say that there is no reason not to, so long as you are getting enough default pageviews to warrant the addition. Fill rates change day to day. Sometimes they can be 5%. and sometimes 50%. This means the pageviews registered by PW change day to day also, and large amounts of fluctuation may scare away bidders. Therefore, the more traffic you get, the harder you should think about adding PW as your final default, because overall fluctuation will seem less. If you are a webcomic hurting for more than 1000 pageviews a day, and you already belong to one or 2 ad networks, you shouldn’t add it. You won’t get enough default views to make any amount of money. (In this case, I recommend actually setting up defaults of banners from your favorite comics, or your other projects, or your store.)
Should you add PW to your page OUTSIDE of an ad chain? Most definitely, and for both large and small comics. Larger comics might want to decrease the amount of ads on their site by putting PW inside the chain, but smaller webcomics who probably shouldn’t have PW as a default might find it more worth it to have ads that show 100% of the time. PW also offers a much wider range of banner sizes, more control over what ads are shown, and ads that are far more likely to generate clicks.
February 20th, 2009 - 4:00 pm
I realize this was posted a little while ago, but I wanted to throw in my 2 cents.
I generally frown on including PW in an ad chain. Because fill rates can vary so much, this can create very erratic page view stats. This is unfair to potential bidders, who may think that past page view trends are indicative of future trends when choosing a bidding price. This is especially bad in webcomics, where many of the people bidding may be inexperienced and not realize that their ads might not always show.
Would I say that you should absolutely never do this? No, it’s each person’s own call. But I think in the interest of respect for the community, it’s thoughtful to be as transparent with these issues as possible.
If nothing else, if you have your PW space in an ad chain, you should mention this fact in your ad space’s description.
April 4th, 2010 - 8:11 am
[...] Adding Project Wonderful to an Ad Chain by Kez (Winged Wolf Studio), refines the notion of ADD CHAINS. We won’t be discussing add chains in these articles which focus on our PW experience, but we will in the near future, and it’s worth having some notions on the subject. [...]