Project Wonderful

By Peter

If you’ve ever done a Google search, you’ve probably noticed the advertising above and to the right of your search results. You may not realize how they work. People create a text or image ad, and then they bid on how much they are willing to pay to have it shown when people search on certain phrases. (And you only have to pay if someone clicks on the ad.) The winning bid gets the top position, and lower bids get lower positions. If you don’t bid high enough, then you could easily end up on page 10 of the search results. It’s the number one money-maker for Google.

However, Google is not the only form of online advertisements. A really interesting one is called Project Wonderful, and it’s been adopted by the webcomic community as the most common form of online advertising. Its bid system is a little different. You create an advertisement as an image, and then you bid how much you are willing to spend per day to advertise on a specific site. The highest bidder wins, and their ad shows up on the site, wherever the webcomic owner wants it to go.

Last week, Amanda created some ads for us, and soon they’ll go live on Project Wonderful. The beauty of advertising on other webcomic sites is that I know that people who like webcomics will be seeing it.