Recently I started using Project Wonderful to advertise Immortal Defense, which is fun but not very effective, probably because currently most Project Wonderful ad placements are on webcomics.
On the good side, it's very cheap: about one cent a click, or less. $60 can get you 6000 new visitors, which is more than I get a month already, so basically doubling traffic for so little is attractive.
On the down side, they rarely stay very long, they just look because they're curious, and typically don't download anything (only around 6% for me). So you'll probably lose money, and not make as much back as you spend.
However, I don't regret it, because it's fun and I do know that at least one person found out about the game through it, and enjoyed it. So I think of it as money "donated" toward letting more people know about the game, without the expectancy that it'd make as much back as it took.
In general indie games are not good to advertise, because of how low the conversion rate (sales per download and money per sale) tends to be. Advertising tends to work best when it's for expensive products or services, or for recurrent customers. So just think of it as throw-away money, better than spending it on a new game or a larger TV or candy or something.
I can recommend one thing though: it's better to use campaigns with lots of cheap ads than to use larger sites with expensive ads. I've tried both, and the smaller sites tend to work better. I'm not sure why, I suspect it has to do with the owners of the sites themselves being more curious who is advertising on them than the readers of a site are, leading to tons of visits from site owners.
(BTW, check out the sidebar to this entry for an easter egg -- it only appears for this entry.)
For those who are curious
The ad was created by J Force for Cliffski, it's not a real ad. I just thought it was so funny that it had to be used.
I use Project Wonderful a
I use Project Wonderful a lot actually, and I find it to be very effective in bringing in traffic. Targetting GM specific sites is a lot more effective than webcomics, at least for advertising a GM built game. Large ads of course have a higher click through rate than the tiny ones which aren't worth even 1 cent. Targetting gaming sites seems to be more expensive, but if you can get an ad on a high-traffic indie game site for $1.50 a day, you're going to get a worthwhile click through rate.
-Tv
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