Kontera and Amazon In-Text Advertising Running Wild
The other day I wrote about implementing Text Link Ads here at Fresh Yields. Well, that went over so well (I still have no sponsors), I decided to try out another advertising solution in Kontera. After adding the provided code to your site, Kontera scans your site for keywords and places PPC ads within your content. When users scroll over the Kontera links, a small window pops up with the ad inside. Amazon has started a similar program, which my wife trying out over at her site.
Here is my problem. I usually don’t imbed too many links in my blog posts, but now with Kontera, there are links everywhere. Just take a look at my last post. I’m keeping the double-underline and non-bold font for the Kontera ads so they will be a little less spammish, but did change the link color to match my normal links. You can certainly make your normal links and Kontera links look identical. It’s up to you to decide if that would piss off your readers or not.
How do you feel about in-text advertising programs like this? Are they too spammy, or can they be a good source of revenue for your blog?
btw, I have no idea how I got accepted. The qualifications include “Generate more than 500,000 page impressions per month“. Once they find out, they will probably pull the ads 
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
March 27th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
I’ve tested out a similar program, intellitext on another big network I used to work with and with hundreds of thousands of impressions a month we made about $50.
Think you might be dissapointed with this test
March 27th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Chad,
When you are making the money I am off of this site (read: $0), it’s pretty hard to be disappointed in anything :). I’m just surprised they accepted my site, as I didn’t read the qualifications until after I submitted the app. I’m trying to figure out where this ad model will work, because people already hate pop-ups.
March 27th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
Steve -
I just added Amazon Context Link ads to a few of my sites today. I am interested to see how they do - it looks like they work a lot like Kontera. I am testing Adbrite on my personal blog, too. I figure the best thing is to try a few different programs out - you’ll never know what is a good match for your content until you try.
Keep us posted!
April 4th, 2007 at 10:43 am
My blog was also approved for Kontera. When i fill up my application I did choose Less than 500000 as my visitor stats..
December 22nd, 2007 at 8:01 am
This is the first I heard about Kontera and in-text ads…thanks. After reading your post I went back to other pages on your blog and looked at the number of double-lined links. For the most part, I think it is ok, especially considering the fact that you are upfront with your readers about the ads.
It seems that there are usually 0-2, and sometimes 3 ads in a paragraph. However, every once in a while, a paragraph will be overrun with in-text ads and that can be distracting.
If there is any way to select it, I would recommend limiting the number of ads inserted in the text to one per every 50 words.
Thanks again for introducing me to Kontera!
February 19th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Nice blog. I found this through search engine. You should also pay a visit to my blog at http://google-ads-for–free.blogspot.com/
Keep up the good work!
March 4th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I have enjoyed your blog. I hope you get back to posting here. Thanks for the info on Kontera.
March 8th, 2008 at 4:03 am
In my own opinion, I think these things are rather becoming more spammy, but I feel the ones you have here is not that much bad though.