ArticleSet - Development

You might have heard or read about In-Text advertising systems like Kontera and VibrantMedia. Basically In-Text advertising solutions work this way: they find keywords on the page where you implement their code, and matches them to In-Text sponsored links. Both of the advertising systems mentioned above requires that your site receives at least 500000 hits every month to apply for them.

What’s strange is that yesterday I was contacted by a Kontera representative looking to speak to me about trying out their In-Text advertising solution. Here is the message I received:

I’m looking to speak to you about running an In-Text advertising campaign within your site. As I’m sure you get numerous requests to place advertising on your site each week, I want to make it clear that our ContentLinks™ work alongside and are non-competing with the ads that are already running within your site. Utilizing our technology is as simple as placing a JavaScript tag into the HTML of your page and our technology does the rest.

ContentLinks™ are an ad unit that matches advertiser’s keywords to the text of your pages and provides your users with an easy way to get more information about what it is they are reading about. We have a partnership with Yahoo! Search and we also work with some of the biggest advertisers online. Our advertisers are paying on a CPC basis and with a click through rate north of the 2% mark, for every million page views our publishers are seeing thousands of pounds in incremental ad revenue that was once not available to them.

We work on a 50/50 revenue share and our payment terms are net 30.

I’m hoping we can work towards a test within your site. Thanks in advance for your time and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

I did a search on Google and found out that Kontera has made a habit out of sending invitation emails to potential publisher like me, even though the traffic I receive at ArticleSet.com doesn’t even rise close to the 500000 hits per month mark.

Kontera uses an In-Text advertising technology they call ContentLink™. This is what they say about it on Kontera’s homepage:

What is a ContentLink™ ?

A contextually relevant keyword that is discovered in real-time on a web page from within Kontera´s vast network of publishers, and is automatically turned into a link to the most relevant ad from among Kontera´s thousands of advertisers. With ContentLink™ publishers generate incremental revenue while advertisers reach their most targeted audience on a Cost-Per-Click basis.

I got interested in Kontera and did some research only to find so many controversial opinions regarding their implementation and functionality of In-Text advertising. Some say it’s better than VibrantMedia, some say it’s worst. Many have said it takes much time to load and the ads they display are irrelevant. There are also many who claim to have increased their revenue with a high percentage using ContentLinks from Kontera.

I decided to give Kontera a try so I applied for an account. I’m very interested to see what they can or cannot do!