I've been hearing many cries of 'Google is the only game in town' and it's simply not true. As an advertiser, I love project wonderful, and I wish more advertisers would use project wonderful.

Personally, I think the auction model project wonderful uses works fairly well

http://www.projectwonderful.com/abouttheinfiniteauction.php

it's not perfect, nothing ever is, but I think it meets my needs (and resists fraud) better than either the cost per click or cost per impression model.

Well, 'reach' wise google really is the only game in town.

eh, if you are a content provider, the question is "who pays more" - I can't answer that question. but eh, if you have a popular site, I don't think what advertisers are willing to pay varies that much. I know most of the sites I advertise on, I saw the site first, then I tried to figure out how to get an ad on the site.

that, and I think the time-based auction model is less vulnerable to fraud than charging on total impressions or clickthroughs. Hopefully other ad networks will copy that model.

> I think the time-based auction model is less vulnerable to fraud than charging on total impressions or clickthroughs.

Here we are fully in agreement.

It's just that if you have a site that has (tens of) millions of impressions per day that it can be quite hard to get that inventory sold, and the ad delivery network will have to be able to keep up with the demands such sites make on its infrastructure.

If I have some time next week I think I'll set up a trial account with them and see how well it performs as compared with adsense on the same body of traffic.

lsc, what's your association with pw? I've read 2 comments in one thread and seen this post in the last 5 minutes - you appear to be on a marketing mission for them?

Am I being too spamish? I thought I was within the standards for behavior on HN.

But that's not what you are asking. I don't have a direct financial interest in this; but as someone who buys ads, I do hope that more sites use the 'time based auction' model of advertising, as it fits well with the way I advertise. See, when I buy advertising, I want to say "Hey, look, I exist" I think my prices provide a compelling argument to research my company further, and I think that many people who need what I'm selling, upon researching my company, will find me to be a good value (or at least worth a try.) I don't expect people to click through a banner ad and buy what I am selling during that session.

Also, I want to make the point that google is not the only choice in this market. Without competition, google will stagnate like any other monopoly. (Or maybe I am just cheesed at google because they bought dejanews, but no longer allow you to search much of the historical NNTP archive. )

Not too spamish, just thought it deserved a bit more transparency either way. Your involvement or otherwise doesn't change the verity of your statement.

And look I gave you chance to enlarge your point, that's good isn't it.

hah. Yeah. The hacker news crowd is subtly different from a purely technical crowd, in that posts like this are Okay. Actually, I think hacker news, and the culture around it helped me to develop a healthy attitude towards marketing. (If you had known me a few years back, well, I had an extremely negative attitude towards marketing, something that isn't particularly healthy for a business owner.)

One of these days, though, once I get myself setup with some cheap storage, I'm going to start archiving non-binary NNTP groups, and setup historical NNTP search. nntp-> email gateways, I think, are also one of the better ways of making mailing lists searchable.

From what I understand from his comments he uses them to run his ads and he's happy about it...