SEO News Blog

Four days ago our company joined the Kontera Publisher Network with some good advertising experiments in mind. We wanted to test if article websites can be monetized easier using in-content ads like Kontera where it simply highlights some keywords and when you hover advertising appears. Unfortunately we are so unlucky that we waisted 3 days without any idea what’s happening.

When you login to your Kontera Web Statistics you see the following message:

Reporting Delay
Data for June 18th and 19th is currently unavailable due to system maintenance! We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Actually the first message was only for June 18th and then the next day it was changed to “and 19th”, and I’m so curious if today they’re going to do the same, but still no changes. I hope they don’t have some major issue with their system because I find it quite unreliable to have such downtime without any proper warnings.

The reason why we switched to Kontera was that pay-per-click programs like AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and others are not really optimized for content insertion and somehow get stuck outside the main view frame of website visitors especially for NON-Product websites where people only concentrate on the center part where the actual article body lies. In such websites we couldn’t squeeze more than 0.3% CRT and that’s really low.

In Content advertising where the actual ads are automatically placed in the content usually perform quite better for article websites and thus we are so passionate to see the results. I guess that’s why Kontera is still down because they don’t want us to get what we need (I’m joking ok?)

UPDATE: I just got this email and thought it would be nice to share it with you:

christopher brown — Director @ Kontera Technologi wrote:
We’ve seen your recent posts. We recently installed a significant upgrade to our system and reporting didn’t move as easily as we had hoped. All hands are on deck and we are working on the matter. We have provided data for the 17th and hope to have reporting resolved by tomorrow or Friday morning at the latest. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions

I’m really found by the fact that that the kontera people are reading my blog and are trying to keep their image on top and that’s something I do appreciate in all companies. I do like kontera and their way of making business and I believe we’re going to have very nice business relationship.

I’ll keep you up to date with what’s going on.

UPDATE June 21

Kontera is back online and all the stats are up and running.
Our data is also there and we are really happy to announce that YES our experiment did confirm that the CTR for articles is quite higher in Kontera than for AdSense and other PPC programs. We managed to get 3.5% CTR which is really nice compared to the less than 1% in AdSense for the same website.

This experiment really proved the value of in-content advertising and we will keep our article/news websites to be powered by Kontera.

If you wish to experiment for yourself please feel free to visit their website and sign up - www.kontera.com

Cheers and Good Luck,
Venetsian