Kontera Pulled Early
Well, that didn’t take long. Two weeks after I first added Kontera’s contextual advertisements to the site, I’ve pulled them off. While I initially planned on giving them at least one month long trial, I’ve pulled them down and will test them on one of my other blogs. Why? Simple… money.
My experience so far with Kontera has been pretty underwhelming. I’ve received a few clicks a day but the revenue per click has been surprisingly low. I’m talking a cent each on occasion. Now I know that Kontera says that it can take a month for the ads to be optimized to my site properly but many of the comments left when I announced that I would be trying the service suggested that it took much longer if it happened at all. That is something that bothered me a bit and to be honest, I don’t see why it would take a month in the first place.
Had the earnings per click been the only issue, I probably would have let the ads run for the full month long test. However, I was also seeing a drastic under reporting of impressions. According to Kontera, I received half the impressions that Google Analytics reports for the same time frame. While some discrepancies are expected, half is a pretty large portion. This raised my level of concern because as I’ve mentioned in the past, if a program has trouble tracking one measurement (impressions) they might very well have problems correctly tracking another (clicks). Once again though, even with these concerns, I was willing to continue the trial period and perhaps address the issue at a later time.
So, what was it that finally caused me to pull the ads? As it turns out, the ads are against Sponsored Reviews’ terms of service. Some of you may remember the little dust up surrounding a somewhat negative review I posted some time back. During my discussions with Sponsored Review, they pointed out that one of their rules is that “Reviews cannot contain in-text advertising (e.g., Kontera) or sponsored links other than those of the advertiser, unless otherwise specified by the advertiser.” I had completely forgotten about that section until this weekend when I happened to be browsing through some old posts and ran across the post where I admitted I had been 2/3rds wrong.
Obviously this last issue isn’t Kontera’s fault but as you may have noticed from some of my previous income reports, Sponsored Reviews is a significant source of income for this blog. I could probably figure out some way to use the exclusion tags that Kontera provides to make sure their links don’t show up in any Sponsored Review posts, but I’m having a hard time justifying going through all that trouble for the $1.91 I’ve made from Kontera so far.
As I said, I will likely give Kontera a test spin on a different blog and I might even put the ads back on this site at some point, but as for now they’ve been shown the door. Please don’t take this as a condemnation of the program as a whole, or even as a recommendation for you to pull the ads from your site. Kontera has worked for several bloggers I’ve spoken to and it might work for you as well. Despite it’s poor performance on this site so far, I will readily admit that I haven’t given it the 30 day period they ask for. The sole purpose of this post was to keep you, my readers, informed of the steps I take towards my goal of a full time income.
I wish they offered an option to exclude certain sections of text. That would seem to be an agreeable alternative.
@ Ron, they do offer that but it would be difficult to do on a post by post basis and really I just don’t want to put in the effort to figure it out for the extra few bucks a month.
You can use a span tag to tell kontera not to place ads inside an article.
If sponsoredreviews was the only concern for removing them, you could filter posts with the Kontera tag not to display ads on that post. But you are right about “cent clicks” I was curious to know how it would perform with you, i see many stories about sites having great earnings with Kontera but thats not my results (at least it pays my hosting bills).
I am giving them more time but we will see.
I am not an expert or well known about these things, I really work so simply, anyway, I was so curious on how blog sites can make money, I had a really nice blogs before until I stopped them for almost a year ago, well my problem was I like to talk about policy but this subject really made me lots of troubles, yes the site had great traffic but I never paid attention to that other than trying to discuss the political subject and those things, so now I really sometimes miss posting blogs and this is why I surf arroung trying to read and see what other write about and trying to avoid policy, lol,
@ Ben,
I didn’t try to make money from my site before other than try to make the people understand how the world run and what is happening arround them and not being ignorance, BUT I had a great traffic than I could ever expect,
so I can think if you don’t think about making online money alot and direct your blogs to provide good information and always find good ideas then you shall have traffic more than you can expect, and the money shall just come to you from all ways and directions, as I said before, you are a good writer and I wish if I have the talent you have, and your site is good, I see you are counting the days and that you are giving it a try for one year, I really hope that you will not stop cause I feel you can make it and boom this site to the world,
Keep the good job and concentrate on your blogs, you are doing well,
Regards.
Thanks Ben, this is the kind of article I like. Stuff that saves me time. When you try something and then report on how it did, I can make a decision faster whether or not I want to try it on my blog(s).
-Dennis
I have the same problem with Kontera. While I don’t run them on nubloo.com – because I do find them a bit intrusive for that kind of content – I placed them on another blog two weeks ago. It sucks that they only pay about 0.01 – 0.02 $ per click.
I had the same plan as you did, Ben, to leave them on for one or two months but I’m not convinced at all until now.
@ Nubloo, I’d be interested in seeing how your ads perform if you leave them on for the full month. Like I said I’m probably going to continue the test on another one of my blogs so I’ll definitely give Kontera their fair shot. I knew going in that the performance initially wouldn’t be what I would like but I had no idea it was going to be that low.
And, none of that touches on why they are reporting half the impressions I’m seeing.
Hey Ben,
I think it’s a smart move. I’ve read pretty much all the guides about getting Kontera to work, and it’s something that can’t be forced. Seasoned readers of blog will NEVER, and I repeat NEVER click on those ads. As for the look; well I don’t mind a couple of them on a page. Just not an excessive amount.
I was over at Slyvisions dot Com the other day and was reading a post about why he removed Kontera from his blog, much like this one.
There was apparently a comment from someone at Kontera who couldn’t even spell his own position:
“Hello Sly,
I’m Mika from Kontera. What you’re describing here are issues that can be changed with simple opimization.
Contact me and we’ll have our optimization team work on it.
Hope to hear from you soon,
Mika
Publisher Servicwes Manager
blog.kontera.com””
@ Ben
I do want to keep it running for a couple more weeks and see how it goes. And from now on, I’ll also check on the impression stats, trust me.
I’ll keep you posted!
I found the same thing with Kontera. In fact, when I changed from kontera back to adsense on one site my CTR went up from under 1% to 4% and I was making .50 to 1.80 per click.
Very interesting results. Does anyone know if Kontera and AdSense can be used at the same time? Or is this against AdSense rules? Just curious, since I’m trying to implement Kontera as a trial. If it’s going to impact AdSense, I may not bother.
Thanks.
@ Simply, it’s fine to run both Kontera and AdSense.
Hello,
My name is Vered and I’m from Kontera.
I wanted to address a few issues that were raised here:
The difference in the impressions’ count is usually caused by the fact that unlike Google, we count as impressions only pages in which there’s at least one ContentLink.
The reason Kontera requires a one-month ramping period is to enable us to fully optimize ContentLink’s employment parameters for a site and monitor the changes’ effects on the publisher’s stats.
We offer means to block ContentLinks from sponsored reviews, and if you’re interested in doing this automatically there are several unofficial plugins for WordPress bloggers that many of our publishers use and recommend.
This being said, I regret reading that you have removed our tag after such a brief period and hope you might reconsider your decision.
Please contact me if you have any additional questions or concerns.
Vered
Publisher Services Manager
Kontera
@ Vered, I understand that you only count impressions of pages that have a Kontera ad on them but every page I’ve clicked through had one so I’m having trouble believing half the impressions didn’t have an ad on the page.
As for the rest, yeah like I said I definitely didn’t give it the month ramp up time you ask for. However, I just couldn’t see the justification to go through any amount of trouble to keep the ads when I made less than 2 bucks in the 2 weeks I had the ads up.
thanks for this, a good read. i run adsense and kontera aswell as placing some affilate links i have from being signed up with comission junction.
Yep, Kontera sucked for me as well and I pulled them. Waste of time but nice concept.
I calculated my income from each blog today and found out that the money I make with Kontera is marginal. I’ve been thinking say goodbye to Kontera. Some readers have also complaint that Kontera’s ads make reading more difficult.
I had Kontera on all my sites for a while and they did not work well for me. I decided to take them off and I dont know if I will be putting them back up ever again.
Hmmmm… Lots of very good information here – I’ll keep an eye on my Kontera results. So far so good though ….