Wizard's Blog

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I’ve been using Google AdSense for over three years and Project Wonderful for six days, so this probably isn’t the fairest comparison.

I replaced the Amazon Omakase ads an my blog with Project Wonderful ones, as I only had 26 clicks on the Omakase ads in the last year.

Google Adsense ads are automatic and context sensitive.  A publisher (person with a website, e.g. me) puts the AdSense code on their site, Google crawls their site to find out what a page is about, and then shows ads relevant to the contents of the page.  To be honest it’s either not very accurate or there just aren’t that many ads out there relevant to my blog posts.  The second part of how AdSense works is that advertisers bid in an auction to have their ads placed for certain keywords.  The advertisers pay for either a number of impressions (times the ad is shown to a person viewing the site) or for a number of clicks.

Project Wonderful works differently in that the advertisers choose specifically what websites they want their ad to be shown on, and they compete in an auction with other advertisers that want to use the same ad space.  The publisher can then accept or deny the ads to keep things appropriate to the site.  It’s more involved than the AdSense model, and sounds like it could mean more work for everyone, but there are automatic accepts for publishers and campaigns for advertisers that can be used to automate things.  Advertisers pay for a certain amount of time, regardless how many impressions of clicks that involves.

So here’s where the comparison comes in – on average I make about $8 a year on AdSense and $1 a year on Project Wonderful (projected).  Not exactly big bucks, but it’s only been six days and I’ll give it more time.  At the moment the Project Wonderful advertisers are bidding a maximum of $0.01 per day to advertise on my site, which isn’t much.

Another distinction between the two is that AdSense only lets you withdraw your earnings once you get to $100, whereas Project Wonderful lets you withdraw at $10.

One thing I like about Project Wonderful is the manual approvals – if you have the time, it’s quite entertaining to see what ads people want to put on your site and how they bid against each other to get the ad space.

Where Project Wonderful has so far disappointed me is in the variety of ads – the majority seem to be for comics.  That’s fair enough if that’s appropriate to the publisher’s site, but what about all the non-comic-related sites out there?

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