TechPatio is around 14 months old/young and back in the days when I first started this blog, I tried out contextual in-text ads. Initially I went with Kontera but I never got it to work so I had to do Infolinks instead. After some time, maybe a few months I guess, I decided it wasn’t worth it – the money to be made was so little that I removed it again.
Now, a few weeks ago, an employee with Kontera contacted me directly because she could see I had an account with them and she wanted to get me started again. After a few e-mails back and forth I decided to give it a go with a Infolinks vs Kontera split-test between the two, to see which performs best for TechPatio. After all, I have around 10x as much traffic today compared to last time I had contextual in-text ads running.
It has now been two weeks and I wanted to share my experience so far, with you guys. First of all let me say that I find it weird how Kontera just stopped replying to my e-mails after I agreed to add them back in to my site. I sent two e-mails, September 2nd and 8th, so far no reply (this was to the same person who wanted to get me back into the game a few weeks ago and not to the general Kontera support/info address). (A reply/apology was received on September 28th claiming that my two e-mails never arrived).
Anyway, since I already publish my visitor stats in monthly reports (as well as my blog income), I see no harm in spilling all the beans with Infolinks and Kontera stats either:
Infolinks: 4,365 impressions, 45 clicks (1.02%), $1.39 earned.
Kontera: 3,949 impressions, 18 clicks (0.46%), $0.75 earned.
It’s worth noting also that I have the Infolinks “related links”-bar added below each article (but only if the split test script has selected Infolinks for that particular pageview). Infolinks claims that using their “related links”-bar you could gain as much as 30% more revenue.
While two weeks worth of testing probably isn’t enough to make a final conclusion, it does seem that Infolinks is a better choice for me but the revenue itself is not something that will pay for my Nikon addiction anytime soon 😀
I’ll give it a few more weeks to see how it goes – I have a feeling that Infolinks will come out as the winner.
What’s your experience with Infolinks and/or Kontera? Leave a comment below!
Imo both are bad. They are annoying to most web users and they tend to lead them to turn off adblock. Plus you don’t make much at all due to the very low quality ads. They are over hyped.
I would tend to agree with this inasmuch as I too had the same experience. Contextcual In-Text ads are supposed to be the answer to the problem of reader’s ad blindness. I thought thus that it would fetch more than adsense. Nope, the performance is negligible. In my blog, I manually put the Infolinks code because I only put them on the ‘not very keyword targetted’ posts. I thinks Adsense is still the way to go.
Yup I had them on my blog too once…totally useless. The ads just aren’t good enough for people to click on them, and they are annoying for people who think there links.
I like these types of post because it really gives the rest of us site owners the chance to know how well a certain network and ad type performs for a certain niche. I’m not running in-text ads on my free kinect site but i am on a few others. I am currently using Infolinks and VibrantMedia ads.
The interesting thing about Vibrant is that they pay much more per click but don’t display half as much ads. Infolinks makes me much more than VibrantMedia because of that.
I haven’t use them both. I think, to really get a good income from them , you need a massive or avalanche of traffic. I mean, the payout from them for each click are quite small so, you really need good traffic to see nice stats from it.
It’s a good move to remove this kind of links anyway. I don’t know how much should they pay to make me install those annoying in-text popups. I hate every single site that uses this kind of advertising.
In my experience adsense is the best PPC
well i disagree will all of you above. kontera does well if you have US traffic . 2nd , you can have a deal with them , if you think you are giving them good traffic and still not getting appropriate results . However they deal with only those publishers which give large impressions …. so get good traffic …
u’ll see top blogs use kontera and not infolinks … so there must be something behind this . I cannot reveal my deal , but the secret is , get good US – Canada traffic and kontera will be the 2nd best waay to monetize after adsense
I’m not running in-text ads on my free kinect site but i am on a few others.thanks..
Infolinks is better than kontera, if you hate text links, try any other cpm ads. it can place at footer or at side bar. for me infolinks perform very badly, last month.
I stopped using text links ad because it’s kinda annoying and don’t give much $ per click like AdSense. I’d prefer my visitors to click on the AdSense ads than text link ones
nothing can beat adsense comparing its high eCPM …
Its good to know about these in-text ads. Just yesterday only, my infolinks account was approved and had it loaded into my newbie blog. Im still on a wait and see if its ok.
Thanks Klauss.
-Jack-
With that little money made in 2 weeks, there is no real “winner” for you:)
If I were you, I wouldn’t waste 2 more weeks with these 2 kind of ads and try something new instead.
Mike
Tried Infolinks as well on one of my websites.
But the results were really disapointing.
And also i’ve to say i hate those intext adds so i removed them.
Wish there was some good alternative for adsense, though…
i cannot get adsense approved…so have to use infolinks 🙁 the only alternative
getting adsense is like cracking the entrance exam of IIT .. [sort of]. So dont give up …. make the best site and apply with a diff amail again
Infolinks is paying less compared to google adsense like in ration
Google adsense :infolinks – 75:1
Infolinks and AdSense are two completely different things. Infolinks put links on text in articles, AdSense adds advertisements (text and image). They cannot be compared.
for me infolinks works great and i never tried kontera
I worked with Infolinks their cpc is low but they are well reputed and trusted in this market of web.