Project Wonderful isn't so Wonderful

I hate paying for impression based ads. Imagine if you purchased ad space on a billboard and had to pay by the number of people who saw the billboard. Most of these people are going to be in their cars driving somewhere and couldn't give two shakes about your ad unless it is for a place to eat, sleep, or is some kind of tourist trap like the World's Largest Ball of Yarn.

Paying by impressions is really, enormously, stupid. Even when I have so much money I can fill a swimming pool with it, like Uncle Scrooge in DuckTales, I'll still loathe impressions. You are literally paying to show your ad to people who aren't going to give it five seconds of their time. It's for masochists.

So Project Wonderful sounds like a fantastic idea. Pay a flat rate to embed an advertisement on a high traffic website for a whole day, and it only costs a few dollars a day. You can read more information about how the service specifically works by checking out this article, Project Wonderful - Website Ads.

I loved this idea until I actually tried it out.

This is how well my ad did.

Project Wonderful = FAIL!

66,350 impressions on a website where people go to find Youtube videos of videogame play got me a whopping 18 (!) clicks to my videogame related Youtube channel, and zero subscriptions. When I think about how I turned the ads off on the video which plays on my channel page (I wanted them to click on the ad and be presented with one of my videos instantly, not another ad), I get even more more frustrated. 

If my count is right (and it could be wrong; several people kept PMing me on Facebook while I was trying to count) my banner appeared in 19 places on the front page of the Let's Play Archive, and got 18 clicks. 

The other two places were Ponibooru and Romantically Apocalyptic. 

Ponibooru is some kind of Brony image sharing site. And before any of you think the problem must be that something is dreadfully wrong with my banner image, it looks so awful nobody at this place would consider clicking on it, this is what the front page of Ponibooru currently looks like,

Ponibooru front page 5/5/2012

I think we can safely rule out the quality of my banner as being the problem for this site. 

Romantically Apocalyptic is a webcomic, and a fairly funny one at that. It's not specifically videogame related but I'm sure that most of the people reading it play videogames. Surprisingly, even though the ad got way less views than the other two sites and appears at the very, very bottom of the webcomic, this ad performed a hell of a lot better than ones at the other two websites did.

So what went wrong here? Well, I have no idea but these are my initial thoughts.

1) Ad blocking software. This is my best guess as to what went wrong with The Let's Play Archive. If I handed out sixty thousand paper flyers with a URL to my channel I would get a hell of a lot more views than 18. With a website ad all they have to do is spend a second to click. A significant portion of the people going to that site must not be seeing the banner ads. 

2) No beautiful women in my ads. This is going to sound sexist, but it's true. All the really successful website banner ads that come to mind use sex appeal to get clicks. The problem is my show isn't hosted by a beautiful woman, it's hosted by me. 

I supposed I could always try to find some hot chick to guest star in a video and then do an ad campaign with her in an alluring pose, but that would still be rather deceptive, wouldn't it? I've been trying to do this whole marketing thing the non-evil way, but the "Hot Girl Effect" is starting to look more and more promising as the failures stack up. 

3) People are desensitized to ads. So there is this part of your brain called the thalamus and if I remember high school biology right (and I may not-- I never finished high school) one of the tasks it is responsible for is filtering out crap from your awareness. For example, I'll bet you don't hear or feel your heartbeat right now, but by the time you finish reading this you may very well feel and hear it now. 

Reason? Your brain typically filters your heart beat out because it's ordinary, non-essential stuff you don't need to pay attention to--  unless for some reason you are made to be aware of it like when someone asks, "Hey, can you feel your throbbing heartbeat yet?". 

This is the same reason why if you go someplace where people don't tend to bathe daily or use deodorant (such as a third world country, or an anime convention) the local residents won't notice the ungodly dreadful smell of bacteria festering on everyone's body but you will; their brains have regarded the scent of body odor as being "ordinary" so they tune it out. They literally cannot smell it. 

Banner ads may be another thing people tune out; if you spend enough years on the internet you start to habitually ignore them. I honestly cannot remember the last time I actually clicked on a banner ad; most of the time, if it really interests me I'll open a browser window and type the site into Google. However I tend to do this because I've gotten my share of viruses by clicking on random ads so perhaps not everyone is as paranoid as I am.

Fortunately, Project Wonderful is dirt cheap. This entire campaign cost me about $3 dollars so far. I can't even get a single click from an AdWords campaign after spending $20, so I guess I can't complain too much. I just wish the quality of the clicks were better... 

For the record, this is not the first time I did an ad campaign using Project Wonderful. I had tried it a few months back, advertising on the front page of The Spoony Experiment for a couple dollars a day, for a week. You can tell by the number of subscribers to my channel right now that it wasn't effective, despite The Spoony Experiment having a similar kind of show format and subject matter to my own. 

1,694 subs = I suck

Now, it might sound surprising but I am not a sugar daddy. Until recently I worked a full time contract (benefit-less) job........ and that job is now over, so I am broke, broke, broke. I'm struggling just to make my house payments, and if I weren't a disabled veteran I wouldn't have any money at all. The entire budget I had for this Project Wonderful run was $10, so once it reaches that I cannot further experiment to see if selecting different sites to advertise on would have better results. It usually costs anywhere from $1 to $20 to bid on any of the decent traffic websites (those getting 35k+ unique visitors per day).

For those of you who aren't penniless losers, what I can suggest is this: try to target Project Wonderful sites where the audience will probably be interested in what you are marketing. 

See this guy, selling golfing merchandise on a movie review website? He's been running ads on several Project Wonderful sites. I know this because when I tried to bid on a few other more desirable websites I kept being outbid by him, and I noticed his ads on other Project Wonderful sites I considered bidding on. 

I have no idea why anyone would market golf accessories on TGWTG (or videogame related webcomics, for that matter) because I am fairly certain people only go there to watch funny reviews about movies, TV shows and videogames -- and the only version of golf any of them might be playing are the ones Nintendo makes. 

My best guess is that the owner of tgw.com hired some marketing firm to handle his advertising campaigns and the firm is ripping him off by spending his money stupidly. Either that or someone came across TGWTG and noticed the similar initials and thought, "Hey, let's buy ad space there!"

Maybe I shouldn't say this because I'm a Youtube Partner Marketing Loser, but don't be that guy. Handle your own marketing, or at least supervise it so your money isn't wasted. That is money that could be going to hire new employees (possibly even employees who get benefits).

In conclusion I can think of worse ways to spend $10, but with the amount of subscriptions I received (a big fat zero) I cannot say it is money well spent. Your mileage may vary on this and perhaps if you are willing to toss a few thousand dollars at Project Awesome you will get better results. On the other hand, that would mean you have a money hose and this blog isn't intended for people who have those kind of resources. 

This is a hose-free zone!

Update! 5/6/2012 6:21 am CST

It's now the end of the $10 campaign. This is the final result.

Saturday traffic is a hell of a lot better than Friday traffic, but I'm still disappointed that 212k views on the Let's Play Archive only resulted in 59 views. 

And of those views, only one person seems to have actually watched anything. I'm judging this based on the number of comments my Seiken Densetsu 3 review received (because it is playing on the front page of my channel), which was exactly 1.

Granted that single comment did result in the individual subscribing to my channel, but still. One might think people coming from the Lets Play Archive would be more into that video.

Still, if you'd like to give Project Wonderful a try yourself, you might have better results. It's pretty inexpensive to test out compared to programs like Virool and AdWords. You may have better results than I did. 

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