May 24, 2007, 12:58 PM — Josh Fruhlinger recently spoke with Ryan North, author of the popular Web comic, Dinosaur Comics and perhaps a little more relevant for this audience, he's also the person behind a new ad auction service that's called Project Wonderful.
Listen to the original interview here, or visit our Podcast Center for more audio interviews.
Josh Fruhlinger: Let's start with a little bit about your professional background as a developer. I know probably most people who have heard of you in your Internet fame have heard of your comics, but what's the technical background behind the comics?
Ryan North: I actually trained and worked as a computer scientist, as a developer, and started the comics in my spare time and they became really popular. So I ended up doing the comics full-time and then computer science is kind of an itch that you have to scratch and so I started thinking, oh, I should do some other stuff, what can I do? What can I enjoy that's also computer science? And that's where Project Wonderful came from. I'm coming from a computer science background today, graduate degree in computational linguistics, which is basically figuring out how to get computers to talk to us and to each other in natural language, which is fun, but hard.
Fruhlinger: I can imagine. You never tried to get the computers to write your comics for you?
North: If I could, I would have a very easy job.
Fruhlinger: So when you started doing the comics fulltime, the idea of doing the ad service wasn't the motivator behind that? You didn't like leave a job to say, I'm going to change the way that ads are sold on Webcomics or something like that?
North: No, no, I graduated and thought I could get a job, or I could work as a cartoonist and one of these seems like a lot more fun.
Fruhlinger: Once you did start to do Project Wonderful, what was it that you wanted to do differently? Why didn't you just put Google ads all over your site or something like that?
North: A friend of mine, Tim, and I, sat down and were talking about how advertising online is really kind of terrible and we thought, well, if we were going to start fresh - like if we invented the Internet yesterday and want to put ads on it today, how would we do it? And so we tossed around a few ideas and came up with what eventually became Project Wonderful. That was about eight months later. But the main idea behind it is that a lot of advertising is sold based on clicks or displays and unfortunately, the Internet isn't really designed to keep track of who clicked where, when, and who viewed what page when, it's just too easy to game it and there's a huge cottage industry, basically, of click fraud and display fraud, things like that. And so Project Wonderful says, well, you can hack displays and you can hack clicks, but unless you have a time machine, you can't hack time. And so it sells advertising based on time. You say I'm willing to pay a dollar a day for an ad on ITWorld.com and that's what you pay as long as your ad's the high bidder and it's displayed.
Fruhlinger: It's kind of interesting because it's almost like that's going back to the genesis of advertising, like pre-Web advertising. It's almost like the story of advertising on the Web has been further and further refinement of how are we going to exactly measure how many people see this ad or how many people click on this ad and it almost is like you're saying, you know what, that's not working.
North: That's pretty much it, and I think that the problem is that the Web gives you this chance where you think, yes, I could keep track of who clicks there and you can approximate it because the information is there, but it's too easy to fake. But as soon as you start selling things based on that information, there's this huge motivation to just - to game it. And we thought, well, if Google hasn't been able to solve this, there's still this huge problem, so probably we won't be able to. Why don't we just sidestep it and do something that doesn't have this weakness.
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