Project Wonderful is a website that makes advertising online more awesome!  True to their word, it’s been the only online advertising service that managed to sell ads on my newly launched Computer Tech News site.   Similar in operation to AdToll, which I reviewed yesterday, it allows advertisers to bid on text and graphic ad space.   There is one subtle but important difference between the two, other than the sites each represents.

Project Wonderful lets you set a minimum bid; Adtoll lets you set an exact price.   By setting a minimum bid of 0.00, advertisers were immediately interested in my Project Wonderful ad.  On the other hand, the .20 bid for my Adtoll listing didn’t interest anyone yet.  My two 125×125 ads started at 0.00, and 24 hours and 11 bidders later reached a high of .02 and .01 per day respectively.  Now, you may scoff at .90 in commissions a month, but for a site only 5 days old I couldn’t be happier.  I could easily add more ad space, and plan to do so by removing AdWords gradually.

The other great feature of Project Wonderful is their Campaign Feature for Advertisers.  It lets you automate your bidding so you can set up a daily spending limit, per site bid limit, campaign total dollar limit, and duration of campaign.  The cost for this service is incredibly low.  Minimums are a bid of .01, a daily limit of .10, and a campaign limit of $5.00.  I’ve averaged a penny a click so far and a CPM of .07.  You can also place a two day bid by hand for 0.00 just to see how things work.  That means Free Traffic for 2 days. 

Negatives?  Only two minor issues.  You can set up a grid of ads, 2×2, 4×4, 3×1, and so on.  My issue was when I put another ad or graphic immediately next to their ad, it would always appear under their ad rather than side by side.  This is important to me because I set up my site using a wide screen monitor and like to design for wide-screen resolutions.  In smaller resolutions, the columns on my site contract and I need my side graphics to stack properly as the screen shrinks.  I emailed Project Wonderful’s support, and in wonderful fashion responded promptly, stating they would look into their code.

The only other issue I faced were some very small websites taking their time to approve my ads.  I suggest setting your own ads to “auto approve” to avoid this problem.  You want to encourage bidding, not discourage it by making bidders wait for approval.  Worked for me.  Whether you want to sell ad space or buy traffic, give Project Wonderful a try.