Yearly Archives: 2010

Does Project Wonderful Make Advertising Awesome?

Project Wonderful is an ad marketplace that is commonly used on webcomic sites and lit-blogs, partially because of the large community of independently-operated websites that use it. They use a nifty “infinite auction” scheme where advertisers bid how much they are willing to pay for a day of advertising, which can get pretty cut-throat on larger sites.

I recently noticed that Reddit had a Project Wonderful ad zone in their /r/comics section, and the current bid was only $4.40. So I decided to seize the opportunity to try out Project Wonderful on a heavily-trafficked web property and promote my younger brother’s comic site a little bit. So I upped the bid by a couple of dollars, became the high bidder, and waited.

After enjoying my victory for a few minutes, and racking up a few impressions, I was outbid by a seller of geeky plush animals. I retaliated by upping my bid a few dollars, and my ad immediately returned to it’s rightful place in front of thousands of Redditors’ monitors. About a half hour later, my squishy nemesis had once again outbid me. Not only had they outbid me, but they had raised it about $10. So I slowly raised my offer until it was just over theirs.

They must have given up for the time being, as my ad remained up for the next day and a half, when my fundage ran low and the ad was finally replaced once again by my foe’s plush Cthulu banner. I ended up spending about $10 for over 50,000 impressions. Not bad.

I’m now trying out Project Wonderful from the Publisher side. I have some ad space on my fantasy book and movie site, where I’m trying to see how quickly a smaller site can start getting bids. A couple of free banners (because bidding starts at $0) are up right now, so I could see others’ bidding them up a few cents in order to get wicked cheap advertising over a few weeks.

How “awesome” Project Wonderful is for a small site, we shall see, but the service certainly lives up to its claims for advertisers.

Vanilla: The Most Modern and Awesome Forum Package

If you’ve been a web user since before the days of social networking sites and “Web 2.0,” you probably spent a lot of time hanging out on discussion forums. It’s a little strange that, as much as the web has evolved, forum solutions haven’t…

Speed Up Your Site With Head JS

Head JS is a 2.3 kilobyte script that makes it easy to asynchronously load your JavaScript files to prevent blocking. It allows the browser to load the web page separately from the scripts, so the rendering process isn’t held up by the download. Non-blocking…

The 1140px Fluid CSS Grid System

A new CSS grid framework has been gaining attention in the blogosphere lately. A 12-column fluid framework with a preferred width of 1140px. The developer picked that width because it fits nicely on a 1280 pixel wide monitor. The framework’s most notable strength, though,…

Apple iAd Producer Lets You Design HTML5 Ads Visually

Apple has just launched a new OS X application intended for advertisers looking to run ads on Apple’s iAd network. The software package, called iAd Producer, gives you an iLife-style tool to visually design interactive HTML5 ads. The iAd Producer displays a chart giving…

Yahoo Claims They Aren’t Shutting Down Del.icio.us After All

Yahoo put out a new post on the Del.icio.us blog stating that, despite all indications otherwise, they will not be closing down the bookmarking service. They may have fired all of the site’s staff and included it on an internal slide as being “sunset,”…

BlogBuzz December 18, 2010

Yahoo is Shutting Down Del.icio.us

According to TechCrunch, Yahoo has fired the entire staff of the Delicious social bookmarking service and will be shutting it down shortly. (Along with Altavista and MyBlogLog.) They will also be closing Yahoo Buzz and some of their API services. Yahoo acquired Del.icio.us back…

Infinity Blade iPhone Game Sells $1.6 Million in Five Days

Just last week the much-anticipated Infinity Blade iPhone game from Epic Games was released. The first to use the new iOS port of the Unreal Engine, it’s stunning graphics have been a major selling point for the game. The big news is just how…

Envato Expands AppStorm Blog Network

Envato has just opened up two new blogs in their AppStorm network. Adding to the existing Mac, iPhone and Web app blogs, the new Windows and Android sites deviate the most from the network’s current audience. Some readers have  voiced concerns that the new…