In my recent post about Entrecard having a wonderful time with Project Wonderful, I wrote about how amazed I was to see that the pricing of Project Wonderful ad-spots at Entrecard is way higher than at Project Wonderful itself and how I thought that Entrecard was making good money with PW.
However, Alex’s comments to that post and his related blog-post told me that Entrecard’s earning from PW ads is almost nothing as compared to what they could have made if their ad-space was directly sold to advertisers. I also gathered views and opinions from some other regular readers at Inspirit about the same, and their views didn’t differ much from Alex’s. Project Wonderful is an advertiser’s tool because of the ultra-cheap advertising it offers and is simply not the right choice for publishers.
Why then, Entrecard is using Project Wonderful?
Phirate, one of the Entrecard Core Developers and a blogger at Entrecard Blog, showered some light on why Project Wonderful is valuable to them in his comment to the same post that I made about Entrecard & Project Wonderful. Here’s exactly what he had to say:
In response to Alex regarding the ad spot price being a joke compared to what we could be making, in part this is true, but PW has particular value to us in two ways:
1. It’s easy to administer, leaving us with time to get on with the real job of building Entrecard, rather than chasing advertisers.
2. PW focuses on 125×125 ads, just like us. This is valuable because it helps give our users the opportunity to advertise on the site, something that is important to our overall mission to enable our users to build their blogging capability.
Whatever entrecard is making out of their 2 Project Wonderful ad-spots and about 12,000 daily unique visitors… we shouldn’t really care when they don’t. But what I really like about EC is its user-oriented approach in whatever they are doing.
The recent workout, the introduction of new advert pricing system (which has been doing good till now), the entrecard interface update, etc, plus this cheap advertising setup in place (Project Wonderful, I mean) for the EC visitors is remarkable.
What do you think?