Question Project Wonderful

Advertisement support company Project Wonderful is closing down its servers this summer. PW has been a source of ad revenue for a LOT of TG (and non-TG) fiction sites and web comics over the years, including the old Crystal Hall site back when Warren was leading the admin side of things. When I took up the wrench to repair and later rebuild, I moved to Google ads out of convenience, really... I was already working with Analytics to map usage and it was easy enough to expand to AdSense.

But as Project Wonderful suggests (and our own analytics numbers reflect), more and more web traffic stays focused at big centralized sites like Facebook which draw content in to their platform instead of having the user actively navigating away to many small sites... like BCTS or Crystal Hall. As a result, Project Wonderful is less able to show site usage numbers high enough to be attractive to big advertising campaigns... and they aren't making it. Like a lot of those small sites. Some, like us, have shifted over to relying on low cost servers and donation support. But all of us are losing a valuable option for supporting the cost of the smaller web sites.

I expect this will have a pretty big impact on BCTS, which relies on a lot of Project Wonderful ads and has been struggling financially for a while anyway.

I don't think its going to be quite that bad for them. I doubt more than 10% of their monthly goals (4 or 5 thousand?) is made from ad revenue. The tough part is that they already use donation and pay wall methods to supplement, so its not simply a matter of cutting ads and replacing those losses with donations. They already are probably at or close to cap on what they can get from donations. 'We' might be able to bring in more donations that we do... we only have 40-ish active donations running and our usage numbers are high enough we should be able to reach almost 100. But then, we don't actively press the issue or offer bonus art or any of the sorts of things you would normally get from such a thing... just a nice mention on subscribers page unless you're a big donor. And our big donors don't seem to want to use their extra visibility benefits (at some people I'll have to talk with them about suggest that maybe they use those advertisement / visibility bennies for their favorite charities or a web site or something if they don't want to use them personally).

BCTS has a larger audience ... I estimate they have between 6-10 times our traffic total... but only 2-3 times out traffic when it comes to visibly interacting with the site community. If they can get 10x our donations from their total traffic? They might actually manage it. But I'm not sure what their options are if they can't push their donations more than 4-5x ours. More than likely, it'll mean they'll need to start streamlining the site so it will run decently with lower server resources. How easy that'll be? Your guess is as good or better than mine.

We are in good shape with the donation level that we are at. There's a bit more than costs, which has let me grab a couple good domains and the flexibility to buy some admin/security software to smooth out some of the behind the scenes stuff. And not to run into problems if a few people pull out. Technically that buffer is listed as compensation for my time on the Patrion site... but that's more about me not having to account for every cent of what I'm spending. If people donate knowing that I'm getting some compensation.. then it doesn't matter if one month I use the 'extra' to buy a case of Cola and the next I snag a shiny domain.

I'd prefer having the same amount spread over a larger number of donors..for stability. But we're good for now.

Yep. I probably have followed more Project Wonderful ads than any other ad service. I spent a couple hundred on buying ad spots for the Whateley site and also to market Glass, when I first released to Kindle.