When I posted this call for Probloggers from Kontera last week, JMMO reader Lindsay said:
Do you have to use Kontera?
Blogging has changed my life and is how I make a living, but I don’t care much for those kind of links on other people’s sites, so I’ve never tried them.
Well, first of all: What is Kontera?
Kontera is a a Pay Per Click In-Text Advertising Platform. Basically, advertisers buy certain keywords from the service, and publishers who sign up with them allow Kontera to ad sponsored links within publisher’s blog entries/posts, based on keywords that were purchased.
So yes, all publishers need to do is sign-up at Kontera, add a code in their blog/site, and just blog/post content as usual. Kontera will then “crawl” the publisher’s blog/site for relevant keywords and add ad-links to those that meet the match.
The Issues
Some people are not really comfortable with in-text advertising. They feel that their content may be a bit compromised by having external links within their posts that they do not always personally endorse.
Of course, other people don’t see any problems with this type of advertising platform.
What I find interesting, however, is that while trying to share an example of a Kontera ad being run, I checked their official blog – thinking they might be running it there. And, I didn’t see it. So, I may just be missing it. Perhaps, you can share some Kontera-enabled blogs or sites here, as examples?
Your Turn
So, with these things in mind, do you think Kontera is something you’ll be interested in using on your blog or site? Why or why not?
I’d like it if I could put the ads on posts that aren’t the most recent, but I haven’t had the time to research the service enough to see if that’s possible.
They sent me an email because having over 400 entries in the archives of the mommyblog makes it perfect for their service, but again, it’s a time factor.
I look forward to finding out more when you learn about it.
Well, I’m certainly not opposed to making money from advertising (I just wrote a big spiel about lovely Adsense has been to me, heh), but I do feel that if something is a link in my actual post it’s an endorsement.
And a lot of the in-text links I’ve seen have been keyed to the word but not to the text around it, so you don’t always get an add that is really relevant to the original post.
But as you say, it’s really up to each individual blogger. There are people out there who say Adsense looks spammy and how they hate it, so who am I to judge?
Hi,
My name is Vered and I’m from Kontera.
Thanks for this post Shai
.
Jennydecki, Kontera ContentLinks are completely customizable and publishers can choose the number, color, location and density of ads that will run on their pages. Customization is very easy to do and in case you’re using WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, we’ve recently released plug-ins that simplify the use and management of our ContentLink ads even further.
I’ll be glad to answer any additional questions and can be reached at support@kontera.com
Kind Regards,
Vered
Publisher Services Manager
kontera.com
I have used Kontera on one of my blogs and it runs fine. Just by installing it I was able to increase my monthly revenues by 10%-15% ( I was running only adsense before).
Some people do complain about the in-text advertising.. although I think that most do not care.
To make it less intrusive, you may limit the number of links into two to three and change the color into a dull one (not bright color).