Alternatives to AdSense: Kontera

Introduction

Kontera is a contextual advertising system that examines your site's text for keywords. It then transforms some of those keywords into hyperlinks that, when you hover the cursor over them, display advertisements. You get paid a certain amount every time one of those ads is clicked on.

Thus, Kontera is:

• Contextual advertising
• Pay per click advertising
• In-text advertising

Or, as Kontera puts it,

[Kontera works using] ContentLink™s, [which] are contextually relevant keywords discovered in real time on a publisher's web page that are automatically turned into a link to the most relevant and highest paying text ad from one of Kontera's thousands of advertisers.

Sign Up Requirements

According to Kontera's web site, in order to be eligible as a publisher, your web site must generate more than 500,000 page impressions per month, be primarily in English, and have more than 50 words per page on most of the site.

However, my experience with Kontera is that they are often happy to work with sites generating far less page impressions. Indeed, when I registered with them, the site I was publishing their ads on did not receive anywhere near that amount of impressions!

My Experience of Kontera

So far, in terms of payout, Kontera is currently second only to AdSense. However, it has still fallen way short of my AdSense earnings.

Another issue that I recently had (in fact, I'm still having!) is that I have been unable to implement Kontera's code on any of my Blogger.com blogs. I have tried every method I can think of to do so, but they have all failed.

As a result, I contacted Kontera support and received a fairly quick reply (less than 48 hours). However, the advice was not very good. In the email, I was also told to let them know if I still had problems. So, I wrote back to tell them I'd tried everything they'd suggested but with no joy. This email lead to the biggest frustration I've had so far with Kontera--their reply didn't even acknowledge or seem to realize that I'd already written before on this issue and, what's more, they didn't actually address the problem I was having with implementing the code but simply told me I needed to use different code on each of my blogs. This, of course, I not only knew but had already been emailed the unique code blocks a few days earlier, by Kontera. I am still waiting for their response.

Finally, Kontera's reporting mechanism often seems to have issues where they fall a few days behind. This happens frequently enough that it makes me feel uncomfortable but it always catches up in the end. However, it does sometimes make me wonder if it under-reports my actual earnings.

Competitors

The main competitor to Kontera is Intellitxt. This has similar sign-up requirements to Kontera but, in my opinion, is less open to smaller publishers. I also personally just plain like Kontera more - I prefer the format of their ads and the actual advertisers. However, Intellitxt generally seems a tad more popular than Kontera.

Conclusion

Kontera is definitely a worthwhile addition to any web site owner hoping to generate extra income, provided you have text-heavy site. As compared to AdSense, my rating would be a generous 6 out of 10.

To learn more about Kontera, read the ebook Kontera AdLinks Secrets (aff).

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