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Kontera vs AdBrite

Posted by Paul B | June 2, 2008 .

So which one is best, Kontera In-Text advertising or the inline ads offering from AdBrite? Both essentially do the same thing taking words from your content, double under-lining them and showing an advert when your visitor hovers over them. If the visitor clicks on the ad then you get paid. It’s an affective way of squeezing extra money out of your content. I’ve now used both Kontera and AdBrite on different sites, the same sites and totally different styles of website. It’s been good fun to see how the different implementations compare.

Signup
I guess the first thing you need to know before getting started with either of this is do you have the option of using both? Kontera are much stricter when it comes to the quality of their publishers than AdBrite, you’ll need a decent quality website with good original content and enough visitors. Whilst you don’t need the hundreds of thousands a month that Kontera once liked I’d suggest you not bother unless you are currently attracting around a 100 hundred visitors daily. You’ll also need to apply for every website you want to show Kontera ads on As I’ve said AdBrite is a much simpler and it takes no time to get approved and to start adding ads on any websites you own.

Speed
Once you have your ad code added to your pages a big consideration is what impact if any it will have on your visitors experience of your website. With any advertising the affect it will have on your page load times is a big consideration. In this battle there is a clear winner, AdBrite. I don’t know why but their ads appear almost instantly and certainly a good 3-4 times quicker than Kontera. On all the websites and pages I tried Kontera and AdBrite on Kontera didn’t load quicker once.

Targeting
You want to show adverts that your visitors are interested in. The more relevant the more clicks you’re going to get. The inline ads from AdBrite seem to very much concentrate on getting themselves out there as early in your text as possible. This usually means all links in the first paragraph of your page content and the targeting can be a bit iffy at best. Expect to see some very general words double underlined! On the other hand Kontera seems to spread itself through the page much better and certainly picks out relevant words to what the page contains. This is generally true with Kontera but however there is the odd time where an advertiser seems to buy crazy general words that can have a big impact on the Kontera targeting.

CPC and CTR
Now we’re talking. How much and how often! Remember that this is only my opinion but I found AdBrite to give a higher CPC in almost all instances. I couldn’t believe it, especially seeing as how general some of the AdBrite words were. How the advertisers were making an ROI on that sort of general word bidding I have no idea. Then again should I really care? Kontera’s accurate ads do seem to give a lower CPC, sometimes to the point where you’d wonder why bother. In terms of CTR I had very split results. On high traffic websites where the search engines were dumping lots of content targeted visitors my CTR with Kontera was MUCH higher than AdBrite. A lot higher. On more general websites where there is more referral traffic (such as a blog) then the opposite was true, AdBrite consistently out performed Kontera although the CTR was never anything like as high as on my top performing Kontera sites. Either way there was a split dependent on where the majority of the traffic was coming from.

Payment
Kontera have a number of payment options including bank transfers (available in local currency) and PayPal. For international publishers this gives us the best chance of keeping most of our earnings instead of giving them to banks. I’ve never had a late payment from Kontera and I trust them 100%. AdBrite only offer USD cheques which is far from ideal for anybody outside the US. Whilst I haven’t earnt enough to get paid yet with AdBrite when I do I’m going to end up getting hit with exchange fees as well as fees for banking foreign cheques. I’ve no idea why some companies carry on with this, cheques are by far the least cost effective method of payment for all concerned.

So What Would I Use?
It all depends on where I was deploying the ads. On a popular website that gets heavy search traffic the extra CTR of Kontera (even with the lower CPC) combined with the chance at retaining more of my earnings with their payment methods means that Kontera would win every day. On smaller more general blog style websites where a good percentage of the traffic is referral based then the quicker load time of AdBrite as well as the extra CPC would win. On new websites that you’re looking to squeeze as much money out as possible then only choice is AdBrite. I consider AdBrite to be bonus earnings from my content where as Kontera can be an integral part of my earning strategy.

What you should keep in mind with all this is that I only actually tried AdBrite because I thought Kontera wasn’t performing. I’d seen my earnings crash over the last 2 months (all from the same impressions). I guess what my experiment with AdBrite taught me was that it’s not just Kontera, Adsense or any other network for that matter making life difficult for website publishers. I’m positive there is a general down turn in the amounts being spent online by advertisers and we’ve just got to grin and bear it.

In my next head to head I’m going to put Cow vs Chow in a battle to see where your advertising bucks give the best return, I’ve been running ads on both lately and have got some very interesting findings.

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2 Comments so far
  1. ContentLink ISRAEL Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  June 8, 2008 11:22 am

    Hi Paul,

    My name is Vered and I’m from Kontera.

    Thanks for this post and for pointing out Kontera ContentLink’s advantages. We work very hard to ensure maximum relevancy between a publisher’s content and our ContentLink ads and believe high relevancy yields high CTR - I therefore enjoyed reading your test’s conclusions :).

    It’s true that we require our publishers to have quality content; however Kontera welcomes sites of all sizes to join our network. BTW, adding more sites to your Kontera account only requires you to send an email to Kontera Support our publishers aren’t required to re-apply.

    CPC isn’t a fixed rate. It varies from one advertising campaign to the next and depends on a variety of factors the main of which being advertisers’ specifications and website traffic volume and sources. Online advertising, as you rightfully pointed out, is a very dynamic market, and therefore changes in the industry influence publisher revenues.

    Thanks again for this post and please don’t hesitate to contact me with any Kontera related question, comment or request.

    Kind Regards,
    Vered
    Publisher Services Manager
    Kontera.com

    ContentLink’s last blog post..Blogging Tips from Kontera’s Sr. Marketing Manager

  2. Paul B UNITED KINGDOM Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14  June 8, 2008 3:58 pm

    Hi Vered and thanks for dropping by. Glad you enjoyed the review, I only tell it as I see it and as things stand I see Kontera as the better option.

    Not that Kontera is perfect by any means, if you could speed up the load time a bit and maybe not allow very low advertiser bids on general none subject related words (or give us a way of blocking them) I’d be happier still!