RSSProject Wonderful vs. Google Adsense: 6-Week Review
by Yvonne | March 18th, 2008 @ 3:37pm | 10 Comments
In the early days of my Project Wonderful trial, a web site owner declared to me that it was far superior to Adsense, which surprised me greatly. For the first few days of my trial, Project Wonderful was breathing down the neck of my Adsense earnings. In the wee hours of the morning on February 5, Project Wonderful took the lead.
And then later that evening, Adsense re-took the lead and proceeded to leave Project Wonderful in the dust. February was an extraordinarily dismal month for my Adsense earnings—I made about half of what I usually make—and it still brought in twice as much money as Project Wonderful, using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.
March has been a better, but still below average, month for Adsense and so far it’s brought in five times as much money as Project Wonderful, again using about the same number of ad units on the exact same web sites.
So what’s the deal here?
As I said in my first-week review of Project Wonderful,
Project Wonderful is a good choice for small sites who want to make a little side money without much effort…
You put the code on your web site and start earning pennies almost immediately, regardless of how much traffic you have. But even at a mere hundred page views a day (which is the range for most of my web sites), you will do much better by optimizing for Adsense.
And I think therein lies the key difference between that other webmaster and me. Whereas I’ve been building web sites professionally and semi-professionally for nearly ten years, know how to optimize for search engines and have partially optimized my sites for Adsense, she mainly got into blogging to support a hobby and decided to throw some ad code on a web page to try to make a little money. She’s not a coder or template designer.
So if you already know a bit about web design and like to get down-and-dirty with your code, do a little research on Adsense optimization and set your site up for Adsense. If you’d rather leave the code alone as much as possible, throw a Project Wonderful block or two or three up on your site and watch the pennies roll in.
Or do both—optimize for Adsense, but re-route the ad money from Project Wonderful into advertising your own site. That just might get you the biggest bang for your buck.
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2. Yvonne | March 22nd, 2008 at 8:41 pm
Funnily enough, your question is answered right in the post. Did you read it?
3. Rico Zuniga | March 23rd, 2008 at 12:45 pm
I just started using PW for advertising my shareware game and I personally found the bidding system to be a bit suspicious.
For example, I started advertising on this site with a stable $.05 bid. As soon as I put my ad on the site the minimum bid rose to $.10 in less than half a day! Note that the other ads in the site look like “generic” ads I see on other unrelated sites with low bids (and they stayed even after the increase in the min bid). So I just canceled my bid in frustration, I’m not getting any incoming traffic anyway. The funny thing is, the bid again stabilized at $.10 after I opted out..
What do you think? Are those “generic” looking ads some kind of bots? And when a “real” advertiser puts his ad a “bidding war” system is triggered? Am I just imagining these things?
Or… I may simply be frustrated to be constantly outbid by other advertisers…
4. Yvonne | March 23rd, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Hi Rico,
I haven’t actually advertised my own sites on PW yet, but I think what you’re seeing is a function of the auto-bid system. From what I can tell the infinite auction works like eBay. You set a max bid for an ad. The system will bid the lowest amount it needs to in order to win the bid for you. If you are outbid, it will automatically increase your bid, up to your maximum bid, to try to win the ad back.
So if the current bid is sitting at $0.05 and you bid a max of $0.06, you could win the ad slot. But if the current ad actually has a max bid of $0.10, then the system will automatically increase the other ad to $0.07 to beat your bid of $0.06. You lose because they have a higher max than you do.
Does that make sense?
5. Rico Zuniga | March 23rd, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Yup it does make sense. But my concern actually is if the bids are genuine and not artificial. Are all the bids done by real people and are not machine generated to artificially blow up the minimum bid value of the ad space. But I guess these qualms of mine are quite standard for sites with some form of electronic bidding.
6. Yvonne | March 23rd, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Yeah, that I couldn’t tell you. I’d hope that all the bids are legit! I manually approve all ads before they’re posted and they do all lead to real web sites, not that that’s a guarantee of anything.
7. Rico Zuniga | March 23rd, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I think (probably) they have deals with bulk advertisers. A kind of wholesale advertising deal thus automated. This could be the reason why the same ads keep cropping up on unrelated random sites and in the process derailing ads by small time individual advertisers like me 
I don’t think I’m gonna be on PW for much longer if this trend continues.
8. Rico Zuniga | March 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Guess what, the bid on the ad space I was talking about in my earlier comments came back down to $.05 (and stabilized) when I opted out. Is this just a coincidence? I think when a real living flesh & blood advertiser (me) puts ads on the space some sort of mechanism detects this and automatically blows up the minimum bid. But when he leaves, the min bid goes back down to the original set by the site owner. I guess those ads that remain are just placeholder ads. Or am I just too suspicious for my own sake.
9. Yvonne | March 24th, 2008 at 12:56 am
Have you tried bidding some outrageous amount to see what happens?
10. Rico Zuniga | March 25th, 2008 at 4:16 am
Nah, the highest I’ve bid is 70 cents. I’m now just focusing my advertising efforts on one site which gives me some incoming traffic, http://www.macuha.com. So far things seem ok.
1. James | March 22nd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
If it is so wonderful, why do you have adsense plastered all over this post?