Some of you might have noticed, apart from the virtual server apocalypse, that we've gone back to a Google Adsense banner in the header of Needcoffee. For a while there we had a Project Wonderful banner. Well, I had promised earlier to let you know about my experience, and Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection jogged my memory.

Project Wonderful is a pretty nifty idea. You offer up ad space. People bid on said ad space. Highest bidder wins the use of that ad space.

There's other detail bits in there, but that's the gist. No click throughs…they're paying for ad space, which is what needs to happen anyway. If somebody puts up a billboard, they have no way of tracking how many eyes saw it. You can't clickthrough a billboard. So it's pretty much that simple.

Now…I agree with Mark Ghosh's post. The setup is easy. Once you've got them in place, there's little to do but any approvals you've set yourself up for. It doesn't clash with any Adsense you've already got in place. You can divide up ad space into smaller bits, like Ectoplasmosis does on their blog, for example.

There are some things I don't get. Mark says that the ad setup and code generation is confusing. I don't get that. It seemed pretty easy to slap together.

However, the site is slow. And there aren't a lot of advertisers, from what I can gather.

I had a banner across the top of my site and a skyscraper down below the fold. However, the deal is that after two weeks I was making less money off of the Project Wonderful banner than I was off of Google Adsense.

Now, perhaps when there's a better group of advertisers who want to buy the space, they'll be in better shape. And I've still got the skyscraper so I can keep my toe in the pool, so to speak. So we'll see. I like the concept well enough, I think they just need to evolve it a bit.