Project Wonderful and Money Stuff and Blah Blah Blah (Patreon)

Heeeeeeey, who likes hearing internet entertainers talk about money and the business side of what they do? …if anyone out their said yes, then you’ll enjoy reading this a LOT more than I’ll enjoy writing it. I hate thinking about this stuff, all this stuff. Alas, current events are forcing me to do just that, and since it has the potential to effect comic production, I figured I’d better let you all know what’s going on.

So, if you’ve really been paying attention, you may have noticed something missing from my websites lately. Down at the very bottom of the page, right next to the little bit of text asking you to turn off you adblock so my ad will display… um, there’s no ad displaying. No, your filters aren’t on the fritz, my longtime ad provider Project Wonderful has shut down. So… what does that mean?

Project Wonderful was started in 2006 by Ryan North (Remember Dinosaur Comics? That guy) to provide advertizing options of webcomics.  Well, not webcomics SPECIFICALLY, but pretty much any smaller blog or fansite or any other internet oddity that wouldn’t be well served by the likes of Google Ads or some other, larger service. Now, as you may have gathered from that intro paragraph, I don’t know diddly squat about the nuts and bolts of advertizing metrics or viewership algorithms or whatever, so I can’t offer any insights about how better or worse Project Wonderful actual WAS than any of the other ad servers out there. But that was kind of the appeal: PW did a very good job of presenting a dull, impenetrable concept in a manner so simple that even a dingbat like ME could do it! I’ll never be able to crunch the numbers of figuring out cost per thousand or whatever, but “Bid such-and-such-money on such-and-such-ad-space for such-and-such-time and if nobody else is bidding more, my ad is what people see” is something I can wrap my head around. And that’s just getting your ads onto other PW-user’s websites, having a space of your own for other people to bid on was even simpler: sign up, paste the html they give you on your page, and approve or reject any bids you receive. Nice and easy.  And you didn’t even have to worry about weeding out shady ads since PW was really good at weeding out redirects and popups and other potentially malicious dangers (and before you object that you’ve seen these things pop up on my site occasionally, SmackJeeves inserts ad spaces of its own from a rotating number of providers, some of whom take a more “approve everything, apologize later” attitude to vetting malicious ads. PW was never the one causing the problem) It was great! …so what happened?

Well, the obvious answer is that it was service specifically aimed at webcomic artists and bloggers and other internet scum. I mean, have you SEEN us internet artist types? We ain’t got no money. If we did, we wouldn’t need sites like Patreon to beg for more, would we? Of COURSE a business model targeting us is a business model doomed to failure! SELF-DEPERCATION! No, but seriously, most ad blocks operated by Project Wonderful dealt in bids that never got higher than a few cents a day. That’s not much to spread around, either to them or us. That sounds really depressing if you’re only looking to host ads and draw in profits, but was actually pretty cool if you were just looking to promote something. Not to get ahead of myself, but I definitely looked at PW as more of a means to advertize MYSELF than host other people’s ads, so only having to bid against other small time competition was a great thing. If I get into a bidding war with Geico, Geico’s gonna win, but some 8th grader’s furry space opera? Yeah, I stand a realistic chance of out bidding that for a few days. But of course, the fact that a system is working out for ME doesn’t mean that system actually WORKS, and Project Wonderful still needed SOMEBODY with actual money to pay the bills.

From what I understand, the idea was for us little cartoonists and bloggers to create a network by putting PW ad boxes on our sites, outside advertisers would see this web of ads and want to make use of it, and THEY would be the ones whose bids would actually pay Project Wonderful’s bills. I remember hosting a number of very profitable ads for new anime from Viz or Funimation and thinking “oh yeah, I’ve really made it now!” That seemed to work pretty well for a while, this service did last for over a decade, after all. But in time those big name bidders disappeared, and obviously a network of broke cartoonists alone weren’t putting enough money into this thing to keep the lights on.  Why? Again, I’m no advertizing fetishist, so I just know what I’ve heard other people say. I’ve seen a lot blame heaped onto those other services that just accept any ad, no matter how pop-up-y, since more competition meant more profits because of supply and demand blah blah blah. However, the most common complain seems to be that The Internet itself is just changing.

I’m gonna try to keep this from sounding too much like a crotchety old man complaining that he doesn’t understand kids these days with their dubsteps and their tumblrs and their hairstyles I just don’t get and BAAAAAH. Anyway, Project Wonderful was based on the old, antiquated idea what everyone doing things on the internet would have their own, separate website to do it. Even if they technically got hosting from a Geocities or a Blogspot or whatever, each site would still be its own distinct entity. Since trying to work out a comprehensive advertizing campaign across each and every one of those independent dotcoms would be too much trouble for everyone, having an independent third party to serve as a middleman between advertiser and site owner was a great idea, ESPECIALLY if the site owner was some poor cartoonist who didn’t want to think about this stuff in the first place. Unfortunately, no one anticipated that the internet would ever double back towards the days of AOL and become all about a limited number of portal sites again. If a guy posts videos on YouTube, who goes to the guy’s homepage to watch them? Everyone just goes to YouTube, looks ‘em up there, and interacts in the comment section if they hate themselves. More and more people get content from their tumblr dashboard or Twitter feed, either posted their directly or via a link to the one specific page of new content. The more people stick to a social media wall, the fewer chances there are for third parties to slip ads into the mix. It’s hard to stick an ad box onto an Instagram post.

Now, obviously, anyone who’s ever complained about Facebook knows that ads on social media are still VERY MUCH a thing, but there’s a big difference: those sites handle their advertizing in-house. Facebook doesn’t need Google or some middleman to step in and handle its advertizing for them, if you buy ad space, you’re dealing with them directly. Doing this sort of thing on your own is obviously a lot more work, but it allows a lot more control over what ads you end up hosting, and more importantly, you don’t have to split the profits with anyone else. Again, this is just my vague understanding as someone who’s never once dealt with any of this directly, there could be a billion little details I’m getting horribly wrong. What matters, though, is how this state of affairs renders separate advertizing services like Project Wonderful unnecessary. And business offering a service nobody needs is a business that won’t be around very long.

So… yeah. Everyone with the money to make Project Wonderful turn a project was spending that money elsewhere, and they couldn’t stay in business. So where does that leave me? What horrible consequences will the lack of advertizing income have on my webcomicing endeavors? Honestly… nothing, in the short term at least. I’ll let you in on a fun little tidbit: in over nine years of having a Project Wonderful ad on my page, I never actually made a cent off it. I mean, I COULD have, but instead of letting the funds pile up enough to make a withdrawal, I just pumped everything my own ad space made into getting my own ads onto other PW users’ sites. Like I said earlier, I quit looking at PW as a means of making money very early on. For most of those nine years, I used it as an automated, impersonal means of getting my links onto other peoples pages that just happened to pay for itself. I’d deposit a few bucks into my account once or twice a year (usually right after a Patreon payout) but the overwhelming majority of the time I just bid with whatever money my own block had brought in rather than anything out of my own pocket. AAAAaaand right way you can see a perfect reason why Project Wonderful couldn’t sustain itself on webcomics alone. They turned a profit by collecting fees from the money people put into the system, but cheapskates like me who just moved around money already in the system just ate up resources without generate any profits. Again, just because a system was working out FOR ME doesn’t mean the system WORKED.

But yeah, I’m not actually making any less money know than I was before… and that’s a good thing, because if I were, we’d probably need to invent a new form of math to figure numbers that low. In a weird way, I wish I WAS taking a major financial hit, because that’d make it really easy to beg for more Patreon donations. And make no mistake, I’ll end up doing just that by the end of this thing, because while the lack of Project Wonderful won’t affect much in immediate future, there’s a more long-term problem that may well turn out to be rather costly.

Remember what I said about using it more for spreading links around than generating profits? That’s because I HATE doing the whole “soliciting readership” thing. Yeah, it’s reeeaaaally important, but I still hate it. I have being on the receiving end of it, and hate dishing it out even more. But a flashy button sitting unobtrusively on the side, to be investigated or ignored at your leisure? THAT I can get behind. Back in the day, this was just a matter of sticking banners into the signature of forum posts, or commenting on other comics with a link in my user name.   Heck, that’s one of the few instances where specifically not sounding like your advertizing something is a GOOD thing! Alas, all that stuff about the internet changing came into play, and that passive strategy started to work less and less. More and more of the forums I used to post on dried up as everybody shifted to newer social media, more and more comics I read started phasing out comment sections (or just wrapping up entirely), and… Well, if I’m gonna be honest, my reclusive anti-social tendencies increased to the point that even posting some random comment on a website was more interaction than I wanted with most people. But clicking a few buttons on a website to make an ad appear on some other website? That I could do… and now I can’t.

So now what? I don’t think I really need to explain why this walking ball of awkwardness can’t very well resort to good old-fashioned word of mouth (at least, not of my own doing). So what about putting out more material? Flooding tumblr and deviantArt and whatever with new art would be a great way to get more links into circulation, right? It’s more of what I’m already doing, and actually has a reason to exist beyond “LOOK AT THIS WEBSITE I’M ADVERTIZING!” Actually, I was already dabbling in this strategy when I started doing those 30 Day Digimon Challenge things back in may… and the fact that they aren’t done three months later tells you why that’s a bad strategy. Heck, I’m posting this on Patreon. How many things per week do I fail to get done here? Trying to get people to look at my comics by adding even MORE to my workload just means there’ll be even fewer comics for people to look at. Not a good plan.

But wait! It’s not like the concept of internet advertizing died with Project Wonderful, why am I acting like I can’t just buy advertizing from someone else and go on like usual? Yeeeaaah… remember how I said this would eventually end with me begging for more money? As bad as it may have worked out for the company itself, a huge part of why advertizing on PW worked for me was because of how little money I actually had to put into it. Doing anything else would require… NOT little money. Example: TopWebComics sells ad spaces on its homepage for a dollar a day. That probably doesn’t sound like much, until you realize I considered it splurging to spend more than three CENTS a day on a single PW ad. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it to advertize directly to people who are explicitly into webcomics, I just can’t. It’s not a question of whether or not a thing is worth spending money if you literally don’t have that money, and I don’t. That’s the real problem here: at some point, I’ll have to do SOMETHING to make up for the lack of new traffic, and that’s almost certainly going to require more funds than I ever use to need for this sort of thing. Which means that, one way or another, I’ll need some extra money coming in.

Yeah, this blog is a LOT of fun, isn’t it? Is there any way to do that WITHOUT resorting to more e-begging? Well, there’s always slapping some new ad where the old one was, but that would require all the pain-in-the-neck research of actually picking a new service. Plus, I already know that none of them have Project Wonderful’s track record of weeding out sketchy ads. Of course, SmackJeeves already inserts its own ads onto my pages either way, so it’s not like it’d make all that much of a difference for you readers what-

Actually, hold on a sec. I haven’t found a place to say this anywhere else, but this whole rigmarole is making me feel a whole lot better about being on SmackJeeves. For years, common knowledge said that only beginners and amateurs put their stuff out on a free hosting site, all the big kids bought their own hosting with their own dotcoms and all that jazz. That’s just what you did. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a LOT of benefits to having a site that’s one hundred percent your own, but the more people shift back towards feeds and portals and whathaveyou, the more tucking all your content away on your own separate page is becoming a liability. People who only planned on scrolling down a single website for a few minutes are getting less and less inclined to click away to somewhere else, and comics walled up in their own little internet fiefdoms are beginning to have trouble thriving in this new environment. SmackJeeves, on the other hand… well, it’s hardly a major social media hub or anything, but it IS one website that’s a one-stop shop for a lot of people’s content, and that seems to be the wave of the future. Heck, right around the time Project Wonderful first announced its looming closure (nearly two months out, by the way, an eternity in website closure terms) SmackJeeves was in the process of setting up its OWN advertizing service.  There’s not really a point to all this, I just wanted to share the bewildering knowledge that, for once, I seem to have stumbled backwards into being ahead of the curve instead of behind it.

So… where was I? Oh right, needing money to pay for advertizing because I’m awkward and slow to promote myself via other means. The other obvious option is… going back to… doing more… Artist… Alley… tables… I don’t want to have to do that, guys. I really don’t want to have to do that. I am gonna need to figure SOMETHING out soon, though. As fate would have it, right in the middle of writing this, Patreon had some kind of snafu that caused a lot of people’s donations to not go through. Just a little reminder that relying entirely on one revenue stream can be really dangerous, since you never know when it might crap out on you. Thank you, Internet!

And… that’s kind of the end, of this blog at least. Yeah, I still don’t really know what I’m gonna do about all this, half the reason I wrote this was to force myself to think about it. That, and to give some advance warning of any potential layout changes if I have to start squeezing more ads onto the site or whatever. If I even end up doing that. I dunno!  All I really want to do is curl up in a ball and work on my silly little cartoons, dang it! All this advertizing stuff is BORING! So, please, donate generously to the Blitz the Comic Guy Patreon, so that he can afford to go back to ignoring all this nonsense.   YOU have the power to make boring, rambling blog posts like this go away FOREVER!