Why the Music Industry Should Embrace Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful is an advertising broker for all levels of online publishers, but is particularly helpful for websites, bloggers, and folks that have something to promote and limited resources to do so. In short, Project Wonderful is great for people writing about, promoting, or performing music. Let me be clear; this is not a way to make a lot of money. This is a promotional tool.

When I first signed EarToTheGround up for PW, I had visions of sugar plumbs dancing in my head. I envisioned hundreds of dollars in revenue per week, a van with our logo emblazoned on the side, and an annual roadtrip to the best festivals in the country. I hurriedly signed up for the service and created an ad box. I was certain we’d be raking in the dough in no time. Here’s what happened…

An ad ran on our site for two days and we made $.0008. That’s not an exaggeration. I’m pretty sure I saved the text that I sent to Casey. I couldn’t believe it. I did the math. I wouldn’t see the van… or a tour… or a piece of bubblegum at that rate. I was crushed. I lamented to Casey that, perhaps, there’s no hope. He told me to hang on for a few days. In the meantime, I played around with the settings. I added a few more boxes. Then I read up a little on “minimum bids” and decided to try that. With a $.10 per day minimum, I tried to hold our collective head high and wait for a better offer.

We did receive a few better bids, but still not much profit to speak of. But where this product is REALLY important for all of us low-level writers, promoters, and industry lemmings… is in networking. Project Wonderful began for comic writers and bloggers. If you search for ad space in that genre, there are hundreds of ads and places to run ads. Then it hit me; we need this for music! There are some music sites at the moment, but there could be many more. We’re actually running ads to bring people to our site that are in the music, art, and otherwise creative world. We’re not getting incredible earth-shattering numbers from it, but since it’s essentially no cost to us (since we’re spending money we made from our own ad space), it’s added traffic and brand awareness. Isn’t that the point?

So here’s my vision, for what it’s worth. Let’s say there are artists willing to put some ad space on their personal blog/band website. Then, also, those same artists could do music promo on other artist’s pages. While it might be a zero sum for most of us, it’s a way to cross promote. But here’s the awesome part of it; there’s no guarantee who will run ads on our sites. So, even though we might intend to run ads on each other, we may end up getting ads from other industries. As our numbers increase, so will our bids, and ultimately our advertising budgets.

This might seem crazy. “Put your headphones back on…” they said. “You don’t know anything about business…” they said. But what if this artistic vision of a zero sum, cross promotional venture could really result in better traffic for all of us and a real opportunity to help spread the word on our collective creative projects without gumming up our sites with too many Google ads?

A few final notes:

-Project Wonderful gives you the power to approve or disapprove all ads.

-You can set a minimum bid, but you must do so at the risk your ad space may sit empty.

-It is possible to land ad space on a website literally for free.

If you decide to give it a try, please use this link and help us, help you.

One Comment Showing 50 most recent
  1. Jeremiah Craig

    This is really interesting and a great idea on your part to bring it to music. I love the idea of effectively “trading” ad space for that zero sum you mentioned. I’ve always been a fan of the trade or barter system instead of exchanging money. Anytime I work with other artists I try to trade. I might have to saddle up for this service!

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