Project Wonderful

Project Wonderful was an advertising service with an innovative model that brought fairness, transparency, and profitability to the advertising process. They were all about making online advertising more profitable and easier for everyone involved!

In the Beginning
Back in early 2006 when they started, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you’d want to see but they were always the odd company out. They didn’t track readers, didn’t sell out their publishers, and never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plagued the internet because their technology just wasn’t built to do that. They let advertisers place an image and link on a website, that was it.

Inroads
They filtered the ads that could run on their network so their publishers knew they could be trusted plus their own members could tell you how good they’ve been for them as both advertisers and as publishers. In the beginning, Project Wonderful reinvented online advertising by making click fraud impossible. They gave advertisers the power to choose what sites their ads appeared on and publishers the freedom to choose what ads showed up on their sites. They made the entire online advertising experience transparent, trustworthy, and fair – as well as more profitable for everyone involved. Their tagline was “Everybody wins.”

Shuttered on 6 August 2018

The Project Wonderful team hoped that would be enough but in the past few years, the internet has changed. Sites like Facebook have done everything to keep people on their network rather than sending that traffic out to individual websites. Many readers who once visited hundreds of websites a day now only visited a few.

At Project Wonderful they believed in a world where an ad blocker wouldn’t be an obvious thing to install because advertising would be good, interesting, and non-invasive. On 6 August 2018 they signed off saying, “Unfortunately, we’re no longer in a position to supply that better option to you.”

I keep this post here despite Project Wonderful’s shuttering to remind us all — to keep trying for that better option.