The Wiki says that PW ads are "tolerated" (source), and I know of at least one high-profile CG site (Cat Nine: Take Two) that has its own PW ads. So, I don't think it's clear that running your own PW ads is a problem.robotthepirate wrote:CG don't like that though as it's their space to sell.
As an aside, I'm considering adding PW to The Webcomic Police this week. I read something that makes sense, which is that ads and advertising go hand-in-hand because ads give you more money for advertising, which, in turn, increases your page views and makes your ad space more valuable, increasing the money you earn and can put into advertising, and so on and so on.
I think it'd be worth trying, at least on a trial-and-error basis. PW lets you view the individual performance of each ad, so you could use different ads and see if any perform particularly well. You also have more room to be creative with the larger ads, but they're also a lot more expensive, so you need to be careful with them or you can blow through your budget quickly.robotthepirate wrote:Would it be worth designing ads specific to certain sites (or at least types of sites)? So if you have a comic audience you'd like to target (because you think people who like that comic will like yours or something) you could make an ad to appeal more to them.
Right. PW manual bids have a default expiration of 30 days, though, which is probably a good amount of time anyways, especially if you're okay with being conservative by setting a low bid. (Remember that Derelict skyscraper I bid $0.70 on? I've seen it get as low as around $0.10, and now it's up to $1.40. So, there seems to be a lot of variance.)robotthepirate wrote:Also I imagine it'll be worth working out a bit of a crop rotation system of which sites to target. Like Cuddly found, if your ad appears on the same site too often all the people who are likely to have clicked it will have done so already. That said it'd be good to return to high yield sites after a while to attract the attention of new readers and also to reattract people who a) read a bit of your work then forgot about it or b) were too busy to click it last time.
Art's generally pretty terrible when it comes to value. If you're after efficiency, you'd probably do better mowing lawns or something and putting the money into ads than by spending that same amount of time working on a cool drawing. That said, fan art should primarily be done for personal enjoyment and as a gift to the creator, with any page views coming as a pleasant side effect. Same thing with connections -- it's fun and informative to talk to people you have a common interest in.robotthepirate wrote:This all seems to suggest quite a lot of research into who you're advertising with, I wonder how effective it would be to advertise on these sites by other means instead of PW. So if Cuddly's going to hunt down other costume drama comics (ok, technically not a logical description) would she get more views/advertising by doing fan art or connecting with the author in some way on deviantArt? Find and befriend rather than find and bid. Obviously that takes a lot more work to do so it's a question of free time vs cost.