I decided to try Kontera on The Naked Celebrity as an experiment. I’m sure a lot of you have seen inline advertising before, but if you haven’t, it looks like this, providing a little pop-up-ish advert only if the user hovers over a link. The links are determined by context, and the links can change from one refresh to the next, I’ve found.

Kontera has worked out better than I could have imagined.  The pay per click is fairly low, but the click-through ratio is so high that it doesn’t matter as much.

Important Stats:

ECPM (revenue per net 1000 impressions): $1.45
Compare that with my ECPM for Adsense for that same site: $0.23

The click-through ratio is a staggering 5.43%.  Compare that with  0.17% on the same site for Adsense.

The downside is that I’m earning under 3 cents per click on average compared to Adsense on the same site paying roughly 6 cents per click on average. But in my opinion, the vastly superior click-through ratio more than makes up for it.  In the same time period, I had,and I’m not kidding, roughly 40 times the number of clicks through Kontera that I did through Adsense.

I’m comparing this to Adsense, but the truth is that you can easily use them side-by-side, so it’s not an either-or situation.

Keep in mind, some people find in-line advertising to be invasive.  I’m not sure I exactly understand why, because unless you read with your mouse hovering over/under every word as you go, you don’t have to see any ads you don’t want to.

On a technical hosting blog I participate in, one user responded that when he first started using in-line advertising, his loyal users did complain.  But after a couple of weeks they got used to it and it was simply a non-issue after the initial storm.

Also, I’ve found their reporting to be a couple days behind, which for stat-watchers and experimenters (I don’t actually think that’s a word) like myself is slightly annoying.

I’m not sure I plan to add Kontera to this blog or to Blogging for Bitter Women (my humor blog), because they have much lower traffic than The Naked Celebrity, although considering some of the topics I talk about on Bitter Women, it would be amusing to see some of the products it considered “in context”.

I do plan to add inline advertising to a large gaming website I run.  It has a large, loyal fan-base, so I’ve already started laying the groundwork for preparing them to see it in the near future in hopes of diffusing any initial reaction to it, but those click-through ratios are pretty amazing.  That site has enough traffic that I might consider going with Vibrant (they require minimum of 500,000 pageviews/month to sign up, whereas Kontera doesn’t have that restriction), just to see if there’s a huge difference in technology, script loading speed (it does slow things down by a couple of seconds) and reporting…. not to mention payout rate.

So in summary:

Pros:

• Very high click-through rate
• Users don’t see ads unless they hover over distinctive double-underlined links
• Kontera has easy entry requirements (no pageview restriction)

Cons:

• Can seem invasive to some members, especially loyal return users
• Slows down page loading by 2-3 seconds.
•  Can take 3-5 days to get approved by all the sites I’ve contacted, unlike something like text-link-ads which approves instantly.

Have you tried Kontera or one of its competitors?  What did you think?

BTW, this is not a paid review, just me filling you in on my experiments as usual.  :) 

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