A few days ago, I applied for inclusion as a publisher with Project Wonderful. I’ve been looking for a sponsor for my site, and I thought a boutique ad service might be just what I need.
Boy, was I wrong about them! First, they rejected my application. A nice, respectful rejection I can take. I can even handle a short, tersely written rejection. But when they basically called me a hack and a content thief, and expected to get away with it, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help it if my blood boiled over. Have a look at what they wrote to me:
“When examining your site, we found that it appears to have one or more (not necessarily all!) of the following issues: sponsored “review” posts, posts with content taken from third parties such as other web sites or Wikipedia, posts with little original material, and so on.”
Excuse me?! I steal content from other websites and Wikipedia?! I write posts with little original material?! What?! Here I am, having typed my fingers off and eaten up my evenings and weekends for the past couple of years with my website, creating original content, writing every post myself, with my own words, and you dare call me a hack?! Now you can forget about doing business with me. And no, I also don’t write sponsored “review” posts.
It looks like — from my subjective point of view anyway — Project Wonderful isn’t so wonderful after all. I’d say a bunch more things about them right here, except my wife edited my post and cut out all the juicy stuff. Apparently I need to cool down and step away from the laptop…
Just to be clear, I did NOT steal this post from Wikipedia.
Raoul Pop 
Have you found an alternative to Project Wonderful? I scrolled through their ads a couple of times, and it seems like there’s alot of comic book sites there. That’s great if that’s your field.
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No, I haven’t. But I also haven’t looked. These days I just run a few AdSense ads on my blog, and that’s that. You might not have even seen the ads, they’re fairly unobtrusive.
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I received the same “polite” rejection email today. I really upset me. I wonder if my “pay to blog” ad did me in. I never have been paid to blog, just signed up for the service.
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Raoul, I’ve been reading your site for only a short time now, but I can recognize the level of effort you put into it. Your thoughtful and *independent* review and video of the Drobo specifically helped push me over the edge into buying one.
I know nothing about Project Wonderful, and had never heard of it until I read this post. But I wonder if their person (or script) that validates new applicants might have seen your “Sponsors” list in the sidebar, or maybe your “Condensed Knowledge” entries and didn’t look beyond those. To any thorough reader, your site is obviously full of original content and original thoughts, but perhaps not so to a person who only gave it a hurried glance. Not that that should excuse the response they gave you! Reading through the list of approval criteria on their site, I can’t see why your site wouldn’t be a perfect match for them.
I hope you can get a satisfactory response from them, even if you decide not to do business with them after this.
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Thank you Adam! I did get a reply from them, and to their credit, it was their CEO who apologized to me and offered to approve my application if I decided to reapply, but I decided not to do it, at least not at the present time. If they were superficial from the the get-go in looking at my site, I have to doubt how well they would have worked match advertisers with my site and how thoughtfully they’d have treated me as a customer long-term.
For the record, it was my recent post about the Energizer batteries that raised the red flag for them. Apparently they thought Energizer paid me off to write it, when I clearly stated in the post that I simply got some batteries from them to try out. That was the top-most post, and whoever reviewed my site obviously didn’t bother to look deeper, or they’d have found clear proof that my site has worthwhile original content and that I’m not a shill.
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