Project Wonderful and Networked Ads

Since the last post was a bit of a downer I thought I'd close on an up-note for 2011.

A quick update on the spammer: We reported them to our hoster for DOS who took a look at the logs and banned him. I was very impressed with the speed this occurred: many virtual jaffas to the tech team at Hostingzoom.

So with that good news, on to the subject of this blog. I tried to switch from Google Adsense to Project Wonderful on a few of my blogs (and a couple I admin) earlier this year. I made a basic mistake and believed that each domain and sub-site had to have it's own ad, which broke the traffic down to a level where no individual site could get enough to keep the ad box active.

Project Wonderful has a solution to this: creating a networked ad. You can set your ad in an iframe and then add the iframe to the sites they have approved. This requires a few tweaks at the PW backend, including submitting the iframe URL for their robot.

As far as I can tell the process is:
1) Get your site approved
2) Create the ad. Don't activate it.
3) Create an iframe holding page on one of the approved websites.
4) On the edit screen, under Name and Location look at the box at the bottom("URL to ad box code") and out the iframe URL in it.
5) Put the ad code on the iframe, and the iframe on the websites.
6) Activate your adbox.

The only drawback using this method is that the stats only shown which of your pages called the iframe, not where a user visited from. If you have stat tracking of your own on these sites anyway (e.g. statcounter), that's not a problem. It also makes it easy to see if any sites start staying above the limit on their own, so you can customise advertising for them.

I'm testing this with a 468 banner on four sites, but might add more sites to the network if it takes off - or more adboxes to the range. Since all the sites were under by one or two unique visitors on average, this should aggregate the visitors, making bids more valuable, and keep the ad visible.

It's early stages yet, but initial indications are promising, and the agreggate traffic is over the required level. It seems like a good way to make some ad revenue from newer sites, ones with niche markets, or fluctuating traffic.

Overall I am optimistic. If it works, it will be a very good way to start the New Year!