Advertising

Project Wonderful is an advertising medium in which they function on a "infinate auction". This means that the publisher places the ad space on their site and the advertiser bids, at say $0.05 per day. Another advertiser then comes along and bids at $0.08 per day. The first advertiser was displayed for the 4 hours 48 minutes they were up and are charged $0.01 for the time they were up. The next advertiser then takes over at $0.08 per day. If another advertiser comes along then they price can go up again. If an advertiser drops, the price goes down.

As a publisher, I say it is not that great. There were days I was making $0.20 per day. I was happy with that (although not jumping up and down). Now I'm making about $0.02 per day. Not worth the real estate. I've never added it to this blog, so I don't how well it will work here, but judging from my experience there, I'd say I will not become a publisher with another site. You do have a lot of control over what you show, which is nice. If you don't like an ad, you don't have to show it. You can cancel them or you can require all ads to be moderated. The problem with moderation is that you must take the time to moderate.

If you are a really new blog and want to have some advertising right away, Project Wonderful might work for you, but they do have an age requirement. Adsense and Commission Junction are great if people click or buy products, but some sites work better with pay per period or pay per impression advertising. In order to use PPM, you need to have a site that gets thousands of visitors a month (a day with some products) so Project Wonderful is a way to get started before you are qualified for PPM advertising.

However, as an advertiser, as I said, the rates a very reasonable. Too inexpensive to make it worth it to me as a publisher, but great for me as an advertiser. Their system is not the easiest to navigate, but has a lot of reporting and searching functions that make it easy to build and manage your campain. As an advertiser, I suggest giveing it a try.

There are many sites now that will pay bloggers to write entries that include links to the advertisers site. These companies might require the blogger to write a positive review of the site, or some other manipulation of the facts. Are these companies evil or bad? Or are they just another way for a site to make some money and get along in this competitive world.

Google does not like them. Many sites that make most of their money from organizations such as these have found their once high page rank plummet as Google thinks they are link farms. Link farming is a site that charges for links to other sites, in order to raise the linked sites PageRank. Google considers such sites as "Bad Neighborhoods" and will ban them.

I have signed up on several of these sites and have written a few such posts. One I am really displeased with, because while I was not dishonest, I feel like the post was just a paid link and did not provide any content to my users. The other two were things I would have written about even if I was not paid.

Personally, I think that is key. If I would have written them anyway, getting paid for them is not a bad thing. I do need money after all. For me, however, the bad taste of writing an article that I felt dirty about is overpowering. I am not sure I will write another paid post. I have no problem including links to products or having advertisements on my site (nofollow, preferably), but I don't want to own link farms. I want sites that mom would be proud of. My mother raised me to be honest. She raised me to think for my self.

What about Google bashing the PageRank of those that write these articles. Google says they are paid links, therefor the site is a link farm. Both are bad in Google's eyes. Are they bad? Or are they just people trying to make a buck? And the sites that get the links? Are they trying to buck the system, or are they just trying to work in a system that makes it hard for the new site to get links? Without paying for links can Joe's Site, the newest site selling handmade zithers get a high PageRank quickly enough to make money during the Christmas season, or is he just supposed to work his way up the ranks and hope that he gets a high enough PageRank to make it for next season?