12 Comments

Sessine
June 21, 2018 at 8:33 am
Thank-you for being the one to alert me to Project Wonderful shutting down. This is an emergency for small advertisers who have been depending on it to get the word out affordably with non-invasive ads. Not me, but a close friend, is going to have his life upended by this. He really needs to reach people like your readers.
Can you talk a bit about what you’re going to be doing instead? It would help him plan!

Myth
June 21, 2018 at 8:41 am
Sure, I can talk about it. In short, this is the latest domino to fall over in the webcomic market. My advertisement revenue from Project Wonderful has cratered in recent years. It’s regularly under $1 a day which isn’t enough to cover the server costs, much less pay the artists. It’s become very difficult to reach any sort of audience. Facebook makes you pay to reach your own followers. Everyone has an ad-blocker, which scrubs out a lot of internet advertising. TWC is my best vehicle right now.

spas
June 22, 2018 at 11:29 am
in that case, voting TWC an extra couple of times per week shouldn’t be that difficult for us…

Myth
June 21, 2018 at 8:44 am
For those interested, here is PW’s message:
Hi Snow by Night:
We wanted to inform you of some sad news:
On August 1st, Project Wonderful will be shutting down.
For over a decade, we’ve been so happy to be your choice for getting the word out about your comic, music, or anything else you come up with. And we’ve been so proud to represent our publishers, who have been creating some of the most interesting, exciting, and worthwhile things online.
But all good things must come to an end. When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn’t track readers, we didn’t sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet – because our technology simply wasn’t built to allow for that. We let you place an image and link on a website, and that was it. And we filtered the ads that could run on our network, so our publishers knew they could trust us.
We’d hoped that would be enough, but in the past several years, the internet has changed. Large sites like Facebook do all they can to keep readers on their network, rather than sending that traffic out to individual websites. As such, many readers – who used to visit dozens if not hundreds of websites a day – now visit only a few sites, and things like the indie “blogosphere” (remember that?) are disappearing. We’re hopeful that individual creators can adapt – either by embracing these walled gardens in a way that protects themselves, or by finding other ways to draw attention to their work – but as a network founded on supporting independent websites, our options were limited. Some advertising networks have held on by adopting more and more invasive user tracking, forcing their publishers to sign binding contracts, or by trying to train publishers (and readers!) to expect that “sometimes a bad ad will sneak through”, but that’s something we always refused to do. We believed – and still believe – that you deserve better. We believed – and still believe – in a world where an ad blocker wouldn’t be an obvious thing to install, because advertising would be good, interesting, and non-invasive.
Unfortunately, we’re no longer in a position to supply that better option to you.
We know this may come as a shock, which is why we’re giving everyone as much notice as possible. Here’s the Project Wonderful shutdown timeline:
June 11th, 2018: We announce our shutdown phase. No new accounts can be created, and no new publishers will be added to the network. Members are contacted to let them know to spend or withdraw their funds before August 1st.
July 11th: Ad serving is turned off, so our ads will no longer appear on anyone’s websites, and any existing bids are suspended. No new bids can be placed on Project Wonderful – but of course people can still withdraw their funds.
August 1st: This is the deadline for anyone to do anything they want with their Project Wonderful accounts before they close!
August 6th: After a few days of grace for any stragglers, and after 12 years, 6 months, and 12 days of service, Project Wonderful’s servers finally go offline.
We want to thank you all: from the publishers and advertisers who have been with us since day one (and there are hundreds!) to those that joined somewhere along the road to today. We’re so proud of the artists we’ve helped support and the good we brought into the world – and we still hope that we’ve managed to bring some change into an industry not typically associated with “decency”. And to the readers who clicked our ads, and in doing so discovered new comics, new work, new ideas, new art, and new people through the simple act of peer-to-peer advertising: we think you’re great too.
It really was a wonderful project. And it couldn’t have happened without you.
-Team Project Wonderful

Apache
June 22, 2018 at 7:25 am
This going to affect the site here any?

Myth
June 22, 2018 at 7:33 am
Yes. We will have to reformat the page to account for PW ads no longer being an ongoing concern.

Apache
June 21, 2018 at 4:37 am
Toldja………………. honey badgers don’t play. Not ever.

David
June 22, 2018 at 3:36 am
“honey badgers don’t play nice.” People have ferrets and mongooses as pets, same family of animals, you end up with pet that is similar personality to wild version but not aggressive, eg ferret who loves to playfight with cats or dogs many times his size.

Apache
June 22, 2018 at 7:28 am
People don’t have pet ratels aka ‘honey badgers’ as pets. And you can never tell what an animal will do in any event, ferrets and mongooses are NOT as domesticated to the extent dogs and cats are.

Chasey
June 20, 2018 at 6:25 pm
Ahhhhh! Did that sharkbear eat that whole person or is he just yanking off an arm? Either way: YEOWCH!

AMX
June 21, 2018 at 3:51 am
Most of the person appears to be lying on the ground, below the chimeras foot.
On a completely different thought, I’m wondering if chimerae are necessarily man-eating monsters, or if it would be possible to construct a cute little pet version…

KromactheRave
June 22, 2018 at 9:40 am
I suspect it is possible, but given that chimera require Aether to create them, it’s probably extremely expensive and not available during war time.

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