4 / 25
Jun 2018

I just received a notification that they are shutting down,
kinda sad because I use project wonderful for advertising my webtoon for 3 years:(
Here's there message :frowning:
Source:
https://www.projectwonderful.com150

n August 1st, Project Wonderful will be shutting down.

For over a decade, we've been so happy to be your choice for getting the word out about your comic, music, or anything else you come up with. And we've been so proud to represent our publishers, who have been creating some of the most interesting, exciting, and worthwhile things online.

But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you'd want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn't track readers, we didn't sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet - because our technology simply wasn't built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.

We'd hoped that would be enough, but in the past several years, the internet has changed. Large sites like Facebook do all they can to keep readers on their network, rather than sending that traffic out to individual websites. As such, many readers - who used to visit dozens if not hundreds of websites a day - now visit only a few sites, and things like the indie "blogosphere" (remember that?) are disappearing. We're hopeful that individual creators can adapt - either by embracing these walled gardens in a way that protects themselves, or by finding other ways to draw attention to their work - but as a network founded on supporting independent websites, our options were limited. Some advertising networks have held on by adopting more and more invasive user tracking, forcing their publishers to sign binding contracts, or by trying to train publishers (and readers!) to expect that "sometimes a bad ad will sneak through", but that's something we always refused to do. We believed - and still believe - that you deserve better. We believed - and still believe - in a world where an ad blocker wouldn't be an obvious thing to install, because advertising would be good, interesting, and non-invasive.

Unfortunately, we're no longer in a position to supply that better option to you.

We know this may come as a shock, which is why we're giving everyone as much notice as possible. Here's the Project Wonderful shutdown timeline:
June 11th, 2018: We announce our shutdown phase. No new accounts can be created, and no new publishers will be added to the network. Members are contacted to let them know to spend or withdraw their funds before August 1st.
July 11th: Ad serving is turned off, so our ads will no longer appear on anyone's websites, and any existing bids are suspended. No new bids can be placed on Project Wonderful - but of course people can still withdraw their funds.
August 1st: This is the deadline for anyone to do anything they want with their Project Wonderful accounts before they close!
August 6th: After a few days of grace for any stragglers, and after 12 years, 6 months, and 12 days of service, Project Wonderful's servers finally go offline.
We want to thank you all: from the publishers and advertisers who have been with us since day one (and there are hundreds!) to those that joined somewhere along the road to today. We're so proud of the artists we've helped support and the good we brought into the world - and we still hope that we've managed to bring some change into an industry not typically associated with "decency". And to the readers who clicked our ads, and in doing so discovered new comics, new work, new ideas, new art, and new people through the simple act of peer-to-peer advertising: we think you're great too.

It really was a wonderful project. And it couldn't have happened without you.

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    Jun '18
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    Jun '18
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Sad to see PW shutting down. They were hands down the lowest cost, highest CTR for our series. Loss of their service ultimately means that the cost of promoting a webcomic goes up, as creators will have to turn to other ad providers such as Google Adwords. The cost at Google Adwords is significantly more than PW. Less competition results in rising pricing. We're already having to pay out a significant amount to Google Adwords to try to drive traffic to our series.

In the end, it's just going to be harder and harder for non-premium series to be found. While this isn't the whole dike coming down, it's certainly a significant leak.

Really sad about this tbh. I've been using Project Wonderful on my site since 2011, and I'm not sure what I'm going to replace it with...

Yeah same here, I don't know what other alternative should i use aside from project wonderful :frowning:

Is there any recommendation that I can use similar to project wonderful where I can advertise for free or cost little?

Right now the easiest to start up, lowest cost alternative is TopWebComics's $1 Daily Sponsorship. As by its title it costs $1 a day. $30 minimum. Your first month you can expect around 30 clicks a day. However, over time the ad declines in efficiency and by the 3rd month it's around 20 clicks a day.

Google AdWords is your next best. Right now though it's running around $.05/click and it takes a ton of time to start up.

We're looking into advertising with another provider and will report back later when we have sufficient data.

PW was essentially the backbone of our ad beast and without it, our series growth is definitely going to stall.

Sigh... This is tough. But thank you for the information. I really appreciate your reply. <3

This is going to destroy a lot of webcomics. We have been working on our for over 3 years, and literally were just getting ready to launch right when this announcement came and we were gonna spend tons on PW for years to come. This has utterly devastated us, and PW should be ashamed of themselves, they make more than enough to keep it going, and they are doing irreparable harm to all the comic sites.

Same. I was pretty much going to get through my 3rd chapter of my webcomic, then try to put my site together and use PW to boost my audience. Now I'm gonna have to figure something else out as far as advertising & promotion.

It will. PW was primarily designed to advertise and monitize webcomics. There is essentially no alternative other than AdWords/AdSense which is far more expensive and much more difficult to work with. It's also super unreliable. One month you can get 1000s of clicks the next month just a handful. PW had huge transparency too. You could know exactly what it would cost to get the top bid. With AdWords everything is just a guessing game and it takes 3 hours for your guesses to take effect whereas with PW it was a 1 second response.

Our CPC rates are essentially going to increase 2x to 3x overnight, which means growth is going to be cut by half or two thirds since you have to be very budget conscious with a free-to-read series.

Now we're racking our brains on alternative advertisement routes. Having a Tapas collaborative space at Anime Expo is definitely looking like the best option at this time.

that is really sad, dude... I mean, I didn't use project wonderful for my stuff, but I found many nice stories through it.. maybe we are waking to an era where we'll only have a chance if publishing premium content?

This has come at the absolute worst possible timing for my partner and I, who were ready to spend serious money on the network. This was the most effective way to build an audience, and so many comicers didn't take advantage. I really think we need to come up with an alternative, or consider maybe buying the platform from Ryan North who owns it. I also wish tapas would offer some advertising options as well. Getting traffic to your comic now will be a nightmare, people really dont know how bad this news truly is.

I get that it's a hard situation for us artists, but this seems a bit extreme? We don't know how much they've been making--in fact, the impression I got from their message was that they're no longer making enough money to sustain themselves. Yes it sucks, but I really doubt they're going out of business just to screw people over.

Having poured through what all their sites are generating in ad dollars with what they have left, I have to think it's making enough honestly.

I don't have any numbers in front of me so I don't know what they make, but I'm pretty sure that running a business isn't exactly cheap. Employee salaries, server maintenance, etc. adds up pretty quick from what I understand.

I don't know though, could be something else besides money causing them to make this decision. Either way, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt.

We're certain that PW has valid reasons for shutting down. Exactly what they are hasn't been revealed. If it was doing well financially they would have sold it to someone else or come up with some other alternative. However it may be a case of just breaking even and the administrators wanting to let go of the responsibility to move on to other things.

For every dollar that comes in, there's around 4% transaction fees if the depositor uses a credit card. Plus PW pays out something like 70% to the websites the ads are on. That only leaves a 26% margin. On $10,000 a month deposits that's $2,600 of revenue. Now you start having to subtract things like what @AmysGames pointed out. Pretty soon there's so little left that there isn't much reason to continue.

PW was too good for too long, that is why we are losing it. Just like DeviantArt's AdCast which ended in 2016. These extremely low cost ad programs are simply not sustainable for the long term.

Free-to-read series are suffering from the fact that there are so many (too many?) that low readership is becoming a common issue. There is only a finite number of webcomic readers available and each webcomic has to compete for that same pool of readers. Either the pool of readers needs to be enlarged or the number of new webcomics needs to slow.

Having no way of getting the word out about your new series may be enough of a hurdle that it will reduce the number of new series being produced, sort of a self-cauterizing effect on the industry.

Or webcomics needs to grow the pool of readers.

A simple stop gap measure which may prove to be effective would be to create a webcomic platform where there is a monthly subscription fee, with the majority of the fees going towards advertisement of the platform. Rather than host all the series there, the first 60 panels could be on the platform then with a "click here to continue" to take readers to whatever is the main mirror.

It would be much easier to run a Google AdWords campaign for a collective of 20 webcomics than 20 independent campaigns.

Having the subscription fee high enough ($50/mo?) would also help narrow things down to being high quality series. If creators aren't willing to invest that much in themselves, how serious are they about their series long term.

We've put in at least four separate requests to Tapas about advertising on the platform. They are against it because they feel it would create an unfair playing field.

We decided to give up on the idea all together after we finally got ads to run on Tapas via Google AdWords. Much to our dismay, Tapas ads perform very poorly (exceptionally low CTRs). Either everyone on Tapas already knows about our series (so they don't click the ads), everyone ignores the ads, or the demographic is not interested in our subject matter. It's probably a combination of all three.

To give you some sort of an idea, our Tapas ad CTRs are .08% vs. .46% elsewhere on the internet. It's the same image ad on all sites so Tapas readers just aren't interested or aren't paying any attention to the squares.

.08% = 1,250 ads shown per click

Yeah I am...NOT happy about this. Like. AT ALL.

This was one of the most straight forward advertising sites and for those us who are not popular? I feel like I am losing a vital organ, to be honest.

Google is as close as we're going to get now and...I don't know. Maybe we can petition google about this. I was seriously thinking of writing an open letter to google and getting people to sign it to either help PW or to help us with something similar that caters more towards those of us who can really only afford the pennies a day model.

Well then... this is awful news.

So far I've only ever been able to use free methods, such as posting on social media sites, etc... I was hoping that once I could find a decent enough job and had enough pages up I could finally put some money into advertising, but it looks like I'll never have enough spare cash at this rate...

I really hope someone comes up with a viable alternative.

Once you can save up $30, give TopWebComic's $1 Daily Sponsorship some serious consideration. It's the same cost as Google, takes far less time to set up, and hits a great demographic. Plus you keep the money in the webcomic community.

We're in discussions with other creators about creating a Tapas Comics co-op at AX2019. Creators would print and sell their own series in a professional space. If it goes well we may start to push it out to other major conventions like San Diego Comic Con in 2020.

Unfortunately with the loss of PW there's no longer any super low cost marketing venues for webcomics.