I first found out about Kontera about a year ago now from the little pop-ups that occur and a variety of different websites, including JohnChow.com, and I thought it might be good for Xfep, but I quickly realized it wasn’t an advertising system for this site at this time. Some of you might be applauding my decision to remove the advertising, while others will be wondering why after less than a month I am giving up on the well known program.

Why Did I Remove Kontera?

There were a few reasons I decided to remove Kontera including:

Too in your face. I didn’t enjoy all the links it was placing and the words it was selecting to change. I am also the type of reader that highlights as I go, and those dang pop-ups disrupt my reading habits, even on my own blog. That was strike one for me.

One cent per click! I was seriously only making a single penny every time someone was interested in what the pop-up had to offer. Looking back at this, I think it would take a good twenty cents a click for me to deem this type of advertising as worthy of the disruption is causes.

Thousands of impressions, few clicks. Seems all my readers are smart enough to avoid clicking on Kontera’s links, leaving me with around one click for every thousand impressions. This site, though it is in the same niche as John Chow’s, just doesn’t work with this type of advertising.

Conclusion

I really appreciated Kontera allowing such a young site into their program, but this just isn’t a site that was doing well with what they had to offer. This doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy their service. Their advertisements were fairly relevant, and their control panel worked decently. I didn’t like that they couldn’t give me hourly statistics. They provide stats that are a day behind, and for any advertising program I am in, I find this to be very frustrating.

As far as I could tell, there was very little I could do to optimize Kontera’s Contentlink script, and the stuff that I did do, probably hurt my chances at making more money with the service, but I still stand by my decision to remove the advertising, and I hope that by doing so, my readers will be happier with this site, and continue to come back and read it.

Originally posted on September 6, 2007 @ 10:12 pm