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So Much For Kontera…
I’m ending my experiment with the keyword-based ad system Kontera. In case you hadn’t spotted it, they are the ones who scan your pages via a Javascript for keywords, and then overlay a double underlined link on top of your web page. When you mouseover one of these double-underlined links, a little bubble pops up with an ad, which you can click on to take you to another site.
I’m eliminating it because they weren’t performing well. Over the course of a typical to moderately-high week of traffic, the ads were only averaging me an earning of like thirty cents a day. With a minimum payoff amount of $100, this would have taken me effectively forever to make any money off of. My Google AdSense isn’t making me a hell of a lot of money these days, but it’s still beating the living snot out of a miniscule figure like that. Furthermore, most of the ads Kontera was serving seemed to me to be spam. Or spam isn’t the right word, but they didn’t have any actual content, or nothing that I felt like could even be argued or stretched to pretending like it was helping readers of my site. Lastly, loading the Kontera Javascript on the pages I had it installed was *significantly* slowing down the page load times on my site. Any one or two of those things is enough for me to question using a service like that, but all three together is a total deal-breaker.
In other news, thanks to TC for a donation through my site - which are certainly always more than welcome. Otherwise, I’m working more and learning lots of new skills which will help me increase my long and short term earning potential as a human being, and my attitude towards work and money is in the midst of a long-overdue overhaul. I’m not feeling very trusting - with the way the economy is going - that this whole “free internet money” thing will last indefinitely and don’t want to be relying on that for more than a tiny fraction of my income. It is right now, no thanks to Kontera, supplying me with what amounts to a part-time income which is great and which I’m thankful for, but I just don’t see it realistically lasting when crunch-time comes.
Back to Kontera for a second though: I do actually think the concept of selling individualized text links embedded within the content of an actual blog post may have some long term potential as a market. Like I said, AdSense has been dropping over the past few months as far as earnings go, and I think banner-blindness for Google ads has probably peaked for most people by now. I envision a future of sorting through information on the web as being more like what Kontera’s system is pointing towards: vast layers of information super-imposed across one another like multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzles. Some of that information would be user-created, others would be paid for by corporations, and there will be just as many shades of gray in between as you can possibly imagine - not to mention ways, methods and paradigms of sorting and surfing that information.
Onward and upward, as they say! If anybody knows of some other worthwhile online ad systems, or if competitive companies are out there reading this, please drop me a line. However, if you have a financial interest in anyone you’re recommending, you’re required to disclose it in any comments you leave below. Thanks for your time!
October 1st, 2008 at 5:11 pm
[…] As a follow-up to my recent post about keyword-based advertising on blogs, I wanted to talk a little bit about the broader subject of corporate sponsorship of multi-media artists in the digital age. Been thinking about the subject for a while, and have even been doing the historical research into the arts patronage system that sprang up in Europe, but my thoughts about the subject didn’t really coalesce until I saw this advertisement on YouTube for a contest sponsored by the SanDisk corporation, which makes hard storage devices: memory cards, etc. […]
October 2nd, 2008 at 4:35 am
Hi Tim,
This is Vered from Kontera.
I wanted to address a few issues you’ve raised here:
1. Any new advertising tool requires a ramp up period to ensure maximum compatibility to a website. I’ve taken a look at your site’s stats and noticed that your test only lasted a few days. You should note that we usually ask our partners to allow at least two weeks for optimizing ContentLink’s settings to their sites. A period during which results may vary and will not necessarily reflect ContentLink’s full monetary potential.
2. With regards to the featured ads, our technology analyzes websites in real-time and continuously adjusts its results to ensure that the highest paying and most relevant ads are matched to a site’s content. However, since Kontera ads are completely customizable, our publishers can easily set their color, number, and location on their end as well as ask us to block any keywords or advertisers.
3. Make sure our tag is implemented correctly- added right before the closing HTML tag, this way it will be the last to load without influencing your site’s page load time.
I hope you’ll reconsider your decision, and will be glad to have our Optimization Team change ContentLink’s settings on your site in order to maximize performance and to best match your preferences.
Kind Regards,
Vered Avrahami
Publisher Services Manager
Kontera.com
October 2nd, 2008 at 8:44 am
Hi Vered, thanks for the comment. However, I’ve utilized and tested a great number of advertising systems on this and other websites over the course of several years, along with running ad programs on behalf of companies I worked for using multiple ad systems. On account of that experience, I can say with some confidence that Kontera is probably not right for me as a content publisher at this time. I’d like it to be, but I just was not seeing the results I wanted, neither financially or in terms of relevant content.
This is a misleading statement. My code was implemented just as you described. And the result was that it *did* slow down my pages’ load time, but it was merely the last bit of code to do so.
In what way is this likely to benefit me? Shouldn’t your system already be set up to give all customers these advantages to begin with?
October 2nd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
[…] {See also: my quote from yesterday, “I’m not feeling very trusting - with the way the economy is going - that this whole ‘free internet money’ thing will last indefinitely…”} […]
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:44 am
On second thought, whatever…
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Although…
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/A_Look_a...__Web_Attack_and_Why_You_Should_Worry