Project wonderful how much

We're so proud of the artists we've helped support and the good we brought into the world — and we still hope that we've managed to bring some change into an industry not typically associated with "decency".

And to the readers who clicked our ads, and in doing so discovered new comics, new work, new ideas, new art, and new people through the simple act of peer-to-peer advertising: we think you're great too. Home » Comics » Ryan North's Project Wonderful to Close Project Wonderful is an advertising service created by programmer, author and comics creator Ryan North, based in Toronto that specialises in providing advertising services for webcomics. Enjoyed this?

Please share on social media! Comments will load 8 seconds after page. Click here to load them now. Latest by Rich Johnston. This quality control along with the time based auction system also helps prevent fraudulent activity.

You can also run Project Wonderful ads at the same time and on the same page as Google Adsense without breaking the terms of service of either network. Have you found Project Wonderful to be a useful advertising resource for your website or ad campaign? Your email address will not be published. Your Website. You are here: Home » Advertising ». Project Wonderful is an online ad platform that started out in And I wouldn't even want to have one million sales, because there's no way I could fill that many orders.

Web comics seem to be a weird special case with risk-seeking utility functions, but the quantity premium on advertising does not only apply to Web comics.

My current thinking is that the quantity premium mostly comes about because of simple supply and demand. More so than with other goods, Internet advertisers often want to buy a significant fraction of the entire supply of suitable advertising that exists , or maybe even more than all of it. Just by placing such a large order, the advertiser has meaningfully increased the total demand in the world.

Then with fixed supply, it is straightforward that prices will go up. But new advertising opportunities in a network like Project Wonderful cannot be created on demand. At best we can hope that if prices go up more Web sites will be tempted to join as publishers because of the higher prices, and there are limits to that, too. The whole world isn't really so big. Project Wonderful in its heyday was only boasting of maybe 10 million ad impressions served per day.

I could only reliably get about a 0. The rest are either people who won't really read my site after clicking the ad, or won't actually click on my ad after all driving down the 0. So it's reasonable to estimate that there existed at the absolute most about 1, clicks per day for sale on Project Wonderful that I could really buy and would not consider seriously compromised as to quality.

If I wanted to buy of those, it would be enough to make a noticeable dent in the entire supply and was, the few times I tried to do it. If I wanted 1,, that was the entire supply and I'd be at the mercy of whatever minimum-bid prices the sellers wanted to charge. I actually wanted 10,, and too bad - that many clicks in a day without quality compromise could not be had at any price, because they just didn't exist.

The fact of real, serious single orders being big enough fractions of the entire market to distort the supply-demand balance seems like it explains most of the quantity premium on Project Wonderful. It suggests that to reduce or eliminate the effect, Project Wonderful really needed to grow a lot bigger, so that the supply would be big enough to absorb orders people really wanted to place without creating price distortion.

Never reaching that critical mass may have been another factor leading to their doom. But even with an increased supply I think there'd be reasons that some bidders who could afford it would always want to buy a significant fraction of all the advertising opportunities that exist.

One reason is to shut out competition. It's worth more to me to have you see my ad and not see my competitor's , than to just have you see my ad. If there is a reasonably hard limit on the channels of communication to potential customers, and I can realistically expect to buy up a large enough fraction of them that other parties can be completely excluded, that's worth a premium to me.

It's fragile, though, and may be difficult in this highly connected era. I might plausibly buy out all of Project Wonderful, but not all of the Internet. And it only works if I buy all or nearly all of the supply.

Fifty percent will not do. Here's a more significant reason to pay a premium for a significant fraction of the supply but not a large majority: the effect that Kevin Simler calls cultural imprinting. Nearly everything human beings ever do, and nearly all the money human beings ever spend, we do for the purpose of proving - signalling - to other humans what kind of people we are.

See also David Chapman's Buddhist take on this fact. Too bad! That's what you get! Really, you almost certainly buy a Leapfrog VCF because you want to prove to others that you are the kind of person who buys a Leapfrog VCF : you are someone who values hand-made electronics, analog technology, and top-quality documentation; someone who has the necessary disposable income to afford an expensive, complicated toy, and the technical skills to play with it properly; and so on.

And you only get your money's worth in signalling your identity to others, if they know what the signal means. So I don't just need you to see my ad. I need you to know that the people you want to impress have also seen my ad. I need you to see it in public where you know many others see it too. Right there we've got a reason for a quantity premium. The value of my product to you increases with the number of others who as far as you know have seen the ad for it.

If you see my ad multiple times, it doesn't just mean linearly more chances for you to click; it means more reason for you to click each time, because you estimate more people to have seen my ad too and so my product has more relevance for signalling to them.

My ad needs to reach a significant fraction of the population you're part of, which means I need to buy advertising in an amount that is proportional to the size of that population. I don't need to buy all or almost all of the market, but I need to buy what in computer science we would call some constant fraction of it. Cultural imprinting would also explain the premium though as I've said, I'm no longer convinced this is large or necessarily even exists for advertising on large Web sites.

When you see my ad on some little podunk Web site that you obviously visited but you don't think your friends visit, you can't expect them to have seen my ad. But if you see it on a major, popular site, you can expect others in your peer group did too, and that makes my value proposition of "Buy the widget that sends a message to others!

Very public impressions are more valuable than the same number of impressions on smaller sites. I never saw a sustained take greater than that on my own site, even when my site had more traffic than it does now. A tiny number of super-star sites Oglaf the porn comic being one of them actually got tens of dollars per day.

At minimum wage. It comes as no surprise, then, that ad-blockers have skyrocketed in popularity in recent years. Ad-blockers hurt smaller websites like ours, but when invasive ads that interrupt your viewing or even threaten you with malware can show up without warning, it makes sense to implement them.

Those same ad-blockers affected honest services like Project Wonderful, and the damage was done. As stated above, social media juggernauts have done everything in their power to keep you browsing their platforms. Creators have bought in to this, too, posting entire pages of their comics on sites like Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, giving readers less and less reason to venture out to independent sites.