I never thought I’d see the day that this topic would interest me; or indeed that I would post my findings, but here goes:
I’m not producing a webcomic “My Life In The Trenches” to make money, but I certainly want readers. To that end, there is a time-proven adage that states “you need to spend money to make money.”
Last week I embarked on a very low-rent experiment and dabbled in paid ads for two separate, three day windows:
- Facebook
Paid USD 7.50 for 11 clicks - Project Wonderful
Auction-based ads, read more about how it works at the creator’s wiki page.
Paid USD 8.93 for 32 clicks
How They Are Similar
Both do what they promise, Facebook serving 55,213 impressions and PW 77,750. Say what you want about ads on the net, but to have your product seen by approximately 132,000 people (even if they ignore the call to action) is fascinating.
Both have very polished management tools, ostensibly making it crystal clear that you should advertise more with them!
Both use the CPC (cost-per-click) model. For PW the average cost per click was 28 cents and Facebook a whopping 68 cents.
How They Differ
The only hitch was that the approval process on the PW ad was thwarted twice; by no fault of the thorough and helpful customer support – but by the esteemed comic’s webmaster that I targeted; an ad must be manually approved and this only happened with the help of customer support at Project Wonderful.
Does Facebook need – or even have – Customer Service? I didn’t use it for the ad manager, since they pretty quickly approved the ad as there is no uncontrollable third-party in the mix. However, I yielded twice as much traffic by announcing to my Facebook friends that my webcomic launched than paying for it; admittedly this is a slippery slope that I don’t want to overdo – but it was free.
Conclusion
Facebookers seem unlikely to stop whatever it is that brought them to Facebook to branch off to check out a comic. The ads may be “unseen” as white noise; a necessary evil. Alternately, by paying for a Project Wonderful ad (since it was invented by a comic artist) on a kindred webcomic site that you select, you’re essentially “preaching to the choir” and readers are more likely to click-through to discover new comics. For my purposes, Project Wonderful is the way to go when paying for a webcomic ad.