This is the end of my first week as an ad publisher on the Project Wonderful ad network.

It is clearly the ad network for small sites and small publishers. As long as you set a minimum bid of $0.01 for each ad box you put up, it should be pretty easy to to earn at least $0.01 per day per ad box, regardless of the amount of traffic you receive. You can withdraw funds when your account reaches $10, or you can re-route funds from ad publishing into placing ads of your own.

It does take a few days for your ad boxes to become established in the system. Your ad boxes don’t show up in a search until the next day. The average number of page views per day is tracked over the last five days, so if your ad box is less than five days old, you will be averaging in zeroes.

The Good
The main upside to Project Wonderful is that it takes almost no knowledge or effort to start seeing some earnings. Because advertisers pay by the day, instead of by the click, you start making money as soon as the first bid is approved. This is in contrast to Adsense, where small ad publishers can go for months and months without seeing a dime.

There are a lot of options for controlling the ads that appear on your site. You can elect to approve each ad before it appears on your site, to auto-approve previously-approved ads or advertisers, or you can auto-approve everything. In addition, you can cancel advertisers’ bids at any time.

The Bad
There’s a pretty narrow range of advertisers on the network. Webcomics and “make money” blogs are overrepresented. Most of the remaining advertisers are blogs of some kind, with a handful of crafters and small retailers thrown in. A few people aren’t even advertising web sites—they are linking the ads straight to Amazon.com via their affiliate codes. Unless you happen to be a webcomic or a make money blog, you probably will not be able to target your ads to your audience.

The ads themselves also leave much to be desired. Many are poorly-designed and unprofessional-looking.

The ad code is not standards-compliant—it uses tables for the noscript layout. This won’t matter for most bloggers, but standards sticklers like me will be tempted to modify the code.

The main Project Wonderful web site is somewhat slow and unreliable. The ad system was down completely earlier today and now it’s throwing periodic errors while I’m trying to check my stats.

The Verdict
Project Wonderful is a good choice for small sites who want to make a little side money without much effort, and who are not concerned with ad targeting. But my sense is that even a small site can do better with AdSense with a little know-how. More on that at the end of the month.

The earlier incarnation of this knitting-related Wordpress theme was extremely popular and now it’s even better!

This version is a little brighter and there are even more pairs of knitting needles topped with glass beads. There will also be a 3-column version of this theme, and both versions will be widget-ready.

I just learned about Project Wonderful, an advertising marketplace. It works on an “infinite auction” paradigm—basically advertisers bid a price per day for ad slots. As long as that advertiser is the high bidder for that ad slot, its ad is shown every time the ad slot is loaded.

Project Wonderful tracks page views, but ad rates are based on the auction, not on the number of page views. Using Project Wonderful does not appear to conflict with Google Adsense’s terms of use.

You can bid $0.00, so you could potentially get advertising for free.

It took a few days to get my web sites approved for ad slots, and another day for people to start bidding on my first ad slot on a different site. The bids so far have been small and pretty irrelevant to the site’s content, but I’m hoping that will change as the slot becomes more established.

I’ve since added a couple more trial ad slots, including the one you see in the sidebar. I’ll keep you posted on how they perform. In the meantime, you can advertise on Faces of Yve for just pennies a day.