Good day everyone. Today I am going to review a fairly popular In Text Advertising publishing system known as Kontera. For those of you who are new to the website monetization field, with “In-Text” advertising, the advertiser’s brand is linked to a relevant keyword appearing in the online content which is matched to the advertiser’s ad. Whenever a website visitor moves his mouse cursor over the linked keyword a tiny text ad appears (sort of like Google’s AdSense but more compressed).
Here is how it looks like:
Ok, now that you have a better idea what Kontera is, let’s move on. But before we do so let me state that this review is targeted at Kontera publishers only. I won’t go into any details regarding what Kontera’s in text advertising system has to offer for advertisers.
I started using Kontera in October 2007 on both my blogs but I just recently stopped using it. I’ll tell you why at the end of the review.
Functionality:
I found the new Kontera control panel to be fairly well put together. The items you need are within “easy reach” sort of speak and the interface is simple and uncluttered. Their interface is still in the beta stages however, so hopefully it will only improve with time. When you first log in your Kontera account you’re presented with the click reports for a period of 7 days and a nifty graph of your revenue for the last 30 days. Overall I’d give Kontera’s interface an A+. The only thing that I did not like is that the click statistics lag by two days – not cool at all.
Additional Functionality:
For you bloggers out there you can download a free WordPress plugin that will make publishing kontera ads a breeze. If you host your blog with Blogger.com rest assured that you can just as easily implement Kontera ads on it. The process is as simple as clicking one button. Personally I used to use the WordPress plugin and found it to work perfectly. It added Kontera ads site wide without any hassle or me having to past code into any of my blog’s pages and such. Just a tip for you folks, if you want site wide ads but DO NOT want to use the Kontera WordPress plugin (I don’t know why you’d go this route but *shrug* to each his own) do the following:
Go to your WordPress admin section and then go to the “Presentation” section. Click on “Widgets” and drag and drop one of the “Text” widgets into either sidebars (depending on whether your WordPress theme has two or one sidebar – some do not support widgets so make sure you get a theme that is widget ready before proceeding). Then just click on the newly added Text widget and copy and paste your Kontera code in the appropriate area.
For regular website usage the process of setting up the Kontera In Text ads is just as simple as Google AdSense. There isn’t much to it folks, just copy and paste the code into whatever page you want the In Text ads to appear and sit back and wait for results.
Loading Speed:
This is a very important factor to consider. There isn’t much point to using any website monetization system if their servers are slow and consequently affect your website loading time. In my experience I’ve found Kontera’s servers to be quite fast. I’ve noticed no slowdowns whatsoever and hopefully Kontera will keep this level of performance up even if the number of publishers increases. However, I must say that I found Google’s AdSense ads to load much faster. Granted this may not be a fair comparison because Kontera has to analyze your website entire text, unlike Google AdSense which just tries to guess what the overall theme of your website is. Perhaps if they throw in more computing power and bandwidth they can substantially decrease the time it takes for their servers to analyze your website textual content – it remains to be seen.
Relevancy:
This is VERY important. The In Text ads won’t make you any money if they are totally irrelevant to the page’s content. I found Kontera’s relevancy to be acceptable. Most of the times it did a good job of putting linking words to relevant ads. However one thing that annoyed me is the number of “generic” keywords that get linked in. For example, the keyword “stock” gets linked to a stock broker’s advertisement but meanwhile your website could have nothing to do with stock trading. If you often use idiomatic speech than this could be a problem. Say if you use the express “take stock not to…” in a blog post totally unrelated to stock trading than you’ll most likely find that the word “stock” will get linked to some stock broker’s advertisement, which may not be what you want. I don’t know whether there is a way around this. Perhaps more intelligent text analysis is needed, but no doubt this is not so easy to implement. So just keep in mind that when implementing Kontera In Text ads on your website you may find a few irrelevantly linked words.
Monetary Performance:
This is probably what you’re mainly interested in. Will Kontera make money or not? Well, this of course depends on a number of factors. The most obvious one is the level of traffic your website receives. The next one is how much advertisers are willing to pay for a specific keyword. While I was using Kontera on both my blogs (alansmoneyblog.com and alansforexblog.com) I was not so impressed with Kontera’s level of performance. First off most clicks earned me like $0.01 to $0.05 – extremely low. Second the number of clicks on ads was not what I expected. My sites get thousands of daily visits yet Kontera was reporting on average only 5-20 clicks per day – once again not what I expected. So I think the Kontera’s CPM rate is just too low. On the flip side this is great for advertisers. They get extremely cheap advertising. So if you’re an advertiser you may wish to look into.
Will Kontera’s In Text Ads annoy my visitors?
This depends on the type of website you place your ads on. When I first setup Kontera on this blog I did receive a few comment from people saying they found the In Text ads to be obtrusive, but that they aren’t so bad once you get used to it. The big problem is if your visitors have a habit of wondering with the mouse cursor. This will trigger the ads like crazy and annoy the heck of your visitors. They will most likely just leave your site instead of being bombarded with the advertising balloons (see the image at the top of this review). Another thing is that some users may mistake Kontera linked keywords for actual website links. Linked keywords are underlined 3 times but still, newbies won’t tell the difference and they’ll think it is a link to a website. They will probably have no clue what is going on and just get annoyed when they see a advertising balloon pop-up and consequently they’ll probably just end up leaving your website. In other words In Text advertising is extremely intrusive!
So I decided to stop using Kontera on both my blogs. Put simply the extra bit of revenue is just not worth it!
Check out the words of Jacob Nielsen, a web usability guru:
One of misery design’s most insidious recent examples is the idea of embedding links to advertising on the actual words of an article using a service like IntelliTxt. By sullying the very concept of navigation, such ads not only damage the user experience on the host site, they poison the well for all websites. Such links make users even less likely to navigate sites, and more likely to turn to trusted search engines to guide them to the next page.
Thus I am not surprised to see that no mainstream website use In Text Advertisement systems such as Kontera. The question you should ask yourself is if you’re willing to put your credibility at stake just for a little (an in my experience it was little) bit more money?
My advice is to NOT use Kontera or any other In Text advertisement system on any of your very important and heavily visited websites – stick to Google AdSense or to standard banners.
However, for those still interested, Kontera’s website can be located at:
That about does it for this review. I hope you found it informative and if you have any opinions or comments you’d like to share feel free to use the comments section below.
Alternatively if you’d like to discuss about Kontera in a forum setting I’ve gone ahead and setup a thread on my forum over here:
http://www.moneyguruforum.com/website-monetization/12568-kontera.html