Why I got rid of Kontera on my blog?

First of all, I want to say that I don’t have any “negative” experience with Kontera, they did not ban me or anything nasty like that, which you might think has trigger me to write badly about them. What I am going to say deals only with my personal experience after running their ads on this website and by no means suggest it won’t work better for you.

If you are not aware, Kontera is a contextual ads network, only unlike Adsense, they don’t display independent adverts on additional (and especially spared) space on your website, but outlines specific targeted keywords inside your site’s pages, double underlines them and you get paid once visitor clicks on these in-context ads. However, when you roll your mouse over the keyword, a small bubble with additional info / picture / video pops out, which I personally find to be very annoying and distracting while reading. Not only be, but it’s in fact one of the most annoying advertising methods you can irritate your readers with.

Those bloggers who also monetize their sites by taking sponsored reviews, know that you must not have third party links inside a sponsored review. There is a special code Kontera provides which stops ads from appearing at a certain area or, you can choose a specific area where ads will be displayed in the first place, however when using a dynamic content site such as blog it’s not very convenient. The issue starts when you decide to prevent the ads from displaying inside a certain post and add the special “spans” around the area which you want to “save” from the adverts. Problem is, it doesn’t always work, since spans are getting auto re-formatted by WordPress, you have to work in the ‘code’ tab, and publish it without switching to preview version, moreover if you publish and edit later it will get re-formated as well. As a result, Kontera manages to spread itself over the entire page. This is against any sponsored reviews program and if you want to make money blogging, you have to choose either Kontera (and loads of extra hassle) or blogging for green.

So, what pays out better?

I made a very basic calculation. TopTut.com is a high traffic site, with no less than 1-2 thousands of impressions daily. I displayed Kontera’s adverts (on this blog only) from 05/14/2007 to 06/22/2007. Over this period I managed to put $11.13 in my porcelain piggie through Kontera (though since I abandoned my account I am not going to ever receive these money). It means, average of $0.5 a day for inconvenience of thousands of visitors daily, as well as slightly slower loading time as it takes a while to the script to crawl the site in real time and display the inline ads. During this period these popping bubbles really irritated me, and I believe made the site look cheaper in many people’s eyes, especially since I always advocate the “less is more” ads strategy.

Now, if I decide to take one sponsored review and publish it on this website, which would not cost anywhere below 35$ (and normally reviews on toptut.com cost between 50$ and 100$) this single review surely won’t annoy any visitor, and will pay out at least 3 times more. Not to mention that bloggers who review sponsored products on a daily basis will sure make bigger income.

This was the short spring love story between toptut.com and kontera.com. Good thing is, we stayed friends with no hard feelings.