I've been having an exchange with a Kontera rep about implementing their ads on this and other sites I own. As you might already know I'm not a huge fan of Google's Adsense network, although we still use them here minimally. While I plan to keep advertisements to a minimum on this site, other than promoting my own products and affiliate products I test and can honestly recommend, I'd like to test them for a few weeks in addition to the ads we currently run.
I know I don't have to ask reader permission for such things, but given this particular audience / niche and the fact that I have more than a bit of respect for you folks, I wanted to put the idea out there for feedback first.
The Kontera ads would simply add links to post content (in existing text -- nothing else added in the way of banners and text ad boxes). I've been assured that I can limit these -- I'm thinking no more than 3 links per page, especially during testing. I've also been assured that they'll prevent any "unacceptable" sites from having ads displayed here. That would include things like content mills or known scam sites. I'd simply have to provide them with a list of sites I don't want to publish ads from. So if you have any suggestions on that front, please leave me a comment with the site and reason (I don't know all of the "bad" sites targeting writers off the top of my head I'm sure).
Feel free to leave some feedback. If there are no overwhelming objections, I'll probably start testing later this week or early next week. I'd like to run the ads for 2-3 weeks minimum to give me enough data to compare conversions between those and other ads running on the site. At that point I'll finalize our overall monetization plan and ad layouts where necessary, and hopefully we'll come up with something readers won't find too intrusive. Just looking for a nice balance between earnings (so I can continue to pay for our wonderful writing team, coders, etc.) and a relatively pleasant reader experience.
I implemented it on one of my Army sites today. I can let you know how it goes if you like. I’m going to test it out for a week and see how it goes.
I already turned it off. I think it is annoying on the site and it takes away from the content. No one had any objections (or at least they didn’t voice any) but it just put way too much on the page.
Thanks for the feedback Stacey!
I just got around to signing up today, so we’ll see how it goes. That was a concern of mine for this blog, but I don’t think it’ll hurt the small business blog much (also testing it there soon). If it gets annoying in-content here, I’ll just pull it out and leave it in those more ad-friendly niche sites. If it converts really really well, I might have to think twice — but not holding my breath on that. My philosophy on ads here is that if they bring in enough to let me invest more and bring more to readers, so be it. If they’re just there to be there, well, I’d rather just focus on advertising my own products.
Additional note — I just finally put them up on BizAmmo.com, and they’re displaying much better ads there in terms of quality. The PR blog not so much. Ads for more respectable companies than some of the no-name sites showing up here, but while the ads are very relevant to the keyword, they’re not at all relevant to the actual content (the word “color” in a post for example doesn’t mean an ad for printer ink is really appropriate).
I’ve only had them up for a few days, but so far not impressed. Not in this niche at least. The CPM is extremely low compared to Adsense (kind of surprising I guess), and it seems to be earning far less over several days than I earn per click with the Adsense contextual ads. So if I had to make a prediction now it would be that I’d keep Kontera up for a business-related niche for a while in addition to Adsense and other ads, but here I’ll probably just stick to Adsense until I weed them out with affiliate offers that I’ve hand-picked and more of my own products for sale.
That said, a few days doesn’t necessarily mean much, especially given that they were up mostly over the weekend. So I’ll still give it a few weeks before I do a final assessment. Sorry to hear they didn’t work out too well for you though. 🙁
I found the revenue to be very low as well, especially compared to AdSense. That really surprised me because with the site I tried it on, the AdSense was only in the sidebars. Clicks with Kontera were only earning pennies. The Adsense clicks had a much higher return.
Hope it works out better for you.