Roughly a month ago I started serving Kontera, in-text, ads. Based on a month of use here are my impressions of the platform:

Ad Relevance

I found that the ads were relevant only to the term selected for the link, meaning that the ad served was based on the word or phrase in the link. This being the case, often times the ads were irrelevant to the overall content. For example, if I wrote a post about login systems, or otherwise mentioned login systems. the word system could be selected as a link to an ad about air conditioning systems.

Revenue Generated

Before I go into detail, let me mention that I do not generate a lot of ad revenue, nor do I expect to. If I break even on the domain costs and hosting fees I’m happy.

I did generate some revenue, and I imagine on a site with more traffic that revenue could easily be significant. What money I did make, however, was far less than was I make on my AdSense ads. I also found that in spite of the fact that the kontera ads are in-text and the Google ads are outside of the main text, the AdSense ads received more clicks. If I had to guess as to why this is, I would say it is because visitors to this site are well aware of what those ads are and for the most part arn’t interested. I imagine the relevance of the ads that I discussed above also plays a factor in this.

Intrusiveness and Conclusion

I personally don’t find in-text ads to be overly intrusive. After some thought, however, I decided that having users mistakenly click what they think to be relevant links and instead be served an ad is not worth the amount of revenue generated. I found that the ‘traditional’ banner ads were more effective and relevant.