Kontera 30 Day account hold before you can remove their ads

Yes the one you spoke of appears to be discontinued.

Sources
http://chitika.com/discontinued-products

Kontera is like bad marriage. They want something from you and not give you enough. That's why we no longer recommend or want to continue with Kontera. They say their ads are geo-targetted and all that but we don't know the deal they struck with the advertisers and they pay us poorly.

When we removed their ads they said that they have an agreement with their advertisers and depends on our traffic. What agreement? and how much are they being paid yet its the publishers that get pitted.

On top of that from it appears in their agreement. They don't even follow their payment agreement. How does anyone continue with a commitment like that? on top of that poor poor customer service.

However, Affinity ads are the worst. Their In-text pops up on page load covering AdSense. We contacted them they didn't reply us until late then said "our system ads are like that" . Went to remove the final code. Sent them 10,000 impressions/day and they said its worth 0.30 like what?

 

Hi Leon,

You could rotate Kontera with a non-competitor like AdSense, but since using both together will only add to your overall earnings, I don't think it would be necessary.

Regarding section "5.2" I appreciate you bringing it up - that information is outdated and in the process of being changed. The current policy is publishers get paid within the first five business days of the second month. Publishers who chose electric payment methods will get their payment faster, while with publishers who get paid by check; we'll send out their check within those first five business days, but it will be up to the speed of the postal service, when they receive it. So for instance, for publishers who live in countries where the mail is slow, with India this has been an issue, we strongly recommend choosing PayPal as your payment option.

The other issue I wanted to touch on, and I apologize it took a little while to get back to you, I know you were waiting on my response, is the issue of how commonplace needing to give 30 days' notice before pulling your ads is. I wasn't initially awareness of this, but apparently Infolinks actually has an extremely similar policy. According to section "7.1" of their Service Agreement, during the first 30 day trial period, if you give written notice that you want to pull your ads, you can do so at the end of the 30 day period. After that, their policy is exactly the same as Kontera's; you need to give 30 days' written notice before pulling your ads. I bolded the relevant passages below:


Term, Termination and Renewal.
7.1.
The term of the Agreement will commence on the Effective Date, and subject to termination as provided below, will remain in effect for a period of thirty (30) days thereafter ("Trial Term"). During the Trial Term either party may terminate the Agreement by written notice and such termination will take effect immediately after the Trial Term. Upon completion of the Trial Term, the Agreement will automatically renew and will remain in force for successive twelve (12) months terms (together, "Agreement Term") unless either party notifies the other party that such party will not renew the Agreement within thirty (30) days of the end of the then current term. During the Agreement Term, Infolinks may terminate this Agreement for any reason at any time and Publisher may terminate this Agreement for any reason upon thirty (30) days prior written notice. Either party may terminate the Agreement immediately at any time in the event of (1) a breach by the other party of any material provision of the Agreement that remains uncured five (5) days after the breaching party's receipt of written notice of such breach, or (2) the other party discontinues its business or is dissolved or liquidated. If Publisher disables the Infolinks Service without the appropriate notice of termination outlined above, such action will be deemed as a material breach of the Agreement and in addition to other remedies Infolinks reserves the right to withhold any and all outstanding payments due to Publisher under this Agreement.

Now does that mean Pamela from Infolinks intentionally lied when she said earlier in this thread her company would never do this sort of thing? I strongly doubt that. More likely it's just a case of someone making an honest mistake.

 

Thank you kindly for your reply.

Your publisher support (account manager) is terrible. I wrote about poor customer support before, and that according to your site Kontera will get back to publishers in 3 days but the site they are holding on now which is less than 2 months old with 6,000-7,000 PV took 7+ days and is performing terribly with Kontera. Nevertheless, its not so much the earnings any more. Bad Publisher support + terrible earnings makes it a bad marriage.

Your account manager emailed us about removing the tags, they were really enthusiastic about getting Kontera back on the sites. They replied questions within hours - and in length. Once its back on BOOM no reply no nothing its been over 24 hours. Essentially you guys got what you want and we're not really important any more. That's bad marriage.

**Added** I hear Kontera lowers your earnings on AdSense, if you search Google you will see multiple people discussing that. So using Kontera with bad eCPM will lower earnings as well.

About your "out-dated agreement" note
How can your account manager hold the agreement to us when you tell us its outdated? Certainly both parties must abide to what is agreed upon and written. You guys sent us the exact agreement and have not abide by this. Until its updated, Kontera is responsible for following the agreement in which they put forth.

About Infolinks
I don't know Pamela. However, our account manager is helpful and respective. They get back to us within 24 hours or less, and as a personal note, people are treated as people.

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The bad about Kontera (personal opinion)
I think Kontera technology is outdated. Kontera is focus on their Geo-target system that essentially puts them behind for normal publishers. You need traffic of at least 500,000/day to get a worthy investment with Kontera.

The site you are holding hit 8,000 impressions yesterday and your system got 4,000. It's not easy to gain people, I can't imagine what even smaller publishers would do. On top of that, the eCPM is the same as any other network. It's not like Kontera is giving specifically high eCPM. The eCPM was $0.55.

I think you know what I'm saying, because nearly 90% of other publishers have said the same thing since 2009 or even earlier. Essentially you need a really big computer forum to do well with Kontera because it's just simply so difficult on all ends.

Like JamesColin's review 35 vs 7 that's a huge gap and there must be some sort of problem there because I'm seeing the same results. The test showed Kontera = $98, Infolinks $315.

There's no comeptition there.

JamesColin's review
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1596258
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By the way, I appreciate you bringing to attention about Infolink's policy.

 

I just looked at the JamesColin thread and I don’t want to dwell on it too much because it’s from 2009 and with market conditions having changed radically since then, there’s not necessarily any correlation to how well these networks would perform for you today. However, I would note that after all the weekly back and forth about which platform was better, he ultimately went with Kontera because we offered him the best CPM deal. Also, I noticed at least one person singled out Kontera customer service as being fantastic.

Regarding our support taking up to 3 business days to respond, we’re very upfront about that. Due to the size of our network sometimes it takes a little longer to get back to you, but as you’ve probably gathered if there’s something you’d like addressed more urgently, I answer publishers 7 days a week.

Concerning Kontera technology, we’re actually extremely state of the art. The R&D team which works across the hall from me is doing some amazing work on such emerging platforms as mobile, tablets, some projects I can’t even hint at; and Kontera’s technology has been featured in such publications as The New York Times.

Given the abilities of our technology, how a publisher will fair with Kontera is ultimately determined by if there are relevant brand ads to match to their content. For verticals like Auto, Tech, and Lifestyle (Food&Drink, Fashion, Travel, etc.), if you have large percentages of your traffic coming from places like the U.S. or U.K. you should see great results. And that’s proportionally true, regardless of traffic volume. If your site doesn’t fit into any of those categories, you still may see superior results - it just depends on the specifics. It’s possible that your site just fell into one of those pockets that’s isn’t the best match for Kontera.

In terms of AdSense, most of our over 15,000 publishers use AdSense and Kontera together, and find it boosts their overall earnings. For anyone who’s still concerned about it, we offer a script that makes sure clicked on Kontera ads open in another tab so that traffic isn’t diverted from your webpage.

Getting back to the outdated agreement date, I totally agree with you that was a mistake, and we’re going to fix it in a way that’s compliant with the requirements set forth in the Publisher Agreement for resolving such issues. It’s a two way contract, and we’re bound by it as well.

I’m sorry that Kontera hasn’t worked out for you, but we actually do track these things, and what publishers say about Kontera is overwhelmingly positive. There isn’t a single ad platform, including AdSense, that universally works for every publisher. If you’d like to talk to me off thread, I’d be happy figure out if there’s anything else we could do to optimize your account, or at the very least, give you a concrete answer on why Kontera isn’t a good match for you.

 

Thank you for your reply! And on a weekend!

Yes I know you reply often to people regarding Kontera. That's why I say you're great compared to the account managers. By no means do I include you in the evaluation.

About your CPM deal with JamesColin, yes it perhaps does give good results but only selected publishers receive CPM while normal publishers get CPC?

About the impressions

This blog also writes about earnings increase from Kontera -> Infolinks switch. Which is most likely due to impressions perhaps Geo-targetting again but he writes "50% increase in what I used to make with Kontera". *Note* he also writes, "The response from the team was always within 24 hours. "

http://www.jimkarter.com/2009-04-15-infolinks-review.html

*Note, the post is from 2009 too but hes been using Kontera as far as 2007 from my short investigation*

Any way, thank you for the reply, I look forward to learning the new announcement about your new technologies.

Have a good weekend!

 

Yes Kontera gave me a CPM deal which doesn't exist normally, they gave me $4.5 CPM fixed, which means no surprises, always at that rate.
But after months, they stopped the deal, so I moved to infolinks.

 

It's true that CPM offers are only made on a case by case basis, but it doesn't inherently mean that will perform better than CPC. I know there are cases where some publishers would have made more through a straight up revenue share, but they prefer the certainty of knowing what they'll get ahead of time, as opposed to betting on the upside.

With "Jim Karter", I think he's since retired from blogging, but at the time he was something of an internet make money guru. If you look closely at his post, the link to Infolinks has an affiliate ID on it. This is just speculation on my part, but he was probably being compensated for his influence, not just his traffic.

 

At the same time, I've found that:
"
Chitika Linx
Back by popular demand, Chitika Linx are in-text ad units that automatically identify relevant keywords on your page to hyperlink (double underline) to interactive paid (CPC-based) product listings. For those of you with a text-heavy site, Chitika Linx is for you!
"
https://publishers.chitika.com/ad-setup/appcenter

But at the moment I'm not putting chitika linx back on my sites. I'm trying their normal ads, so far it doesn't look too good, but with no more adsense account, before moving on to CPA networks, I'm still taking any money that comes my way even if the earnings for the same traffic are divided by 4-6 times..

 

Thank you. I saw it too. When you click enable, does it enable it for all sites? Or can you select only certain ones? I'm afraid to enable it at the moment.


Follow-up on Kontera

2 Weeks in the account manager has not replied to our emails.

Our eCPM is continuing to drop and with 10,000/day GEO-TARGETTED impressions we get a buck. I love how they treat their publishers and chances are there will be a lot more bad reviews coming soon in 2012.

Anyone considering to use Kontera please don't and read the reviews, they usually speak for themselves. A company can prove they are better through their actions but when 100000000000 people on the internet on Google's search engine says Kontera is terrible. It's not something you want to touch if you are serious about your sites.

2 more weeks until the divorce papers are finalized.

 

Don't worry I won't use Kontera anymore. I'm taking the infolinks tiny money regarding the in-text-ads, but focusing on the rest of the revenue income ways, because there's no future in in-text-ads in terms of money, at least the ones I tried (chitika lynx, kontera and infolinks) have been very low CPM.. But it's normal maybe, I don't know, I consider that as a very small side income, and every little bit counts afterall, it is additional money to pay the internet connection, maybe the mobile phone bills too, but not much more

As for chitika linx reborn, I don't know I haven't enabled it on my account and don't intend to, I'll wait until I read good genuine reviews about it.

 

Leon, short of your message accidentally ending up in a junk mail folder, there's no reason it should take 2 weeks to respond to you. If you let me know who you're account manager is I'd be happy to talk to them and figure out what happened.

 

I looked into the issue with your account manager not getting back to you, and he replied yesterday. I saw the e-mail send on your end and it looks like an unfortunate misunderstanding. While looking at it knowing the context I could tell that there was question, it was a bit confusing as to if the line about campaigns was a statement or question, and it got interpreted incorrectly. We apologize for not getting back to you earlier, it definitely wasn't intentional.

Also, looking at your website specifics for the first time, I have a little better grasp on what's going on with your eCPM. While you're getting great campaigns from advertisers like Verizon, Mastercard, and Chevy; when you're looking at sites that have single digit daily clicks, a click or two from outside regions advertisers are targeting will dramatically lower your eCPM. With larger sites, they're getting the exact same ads as you, but because of the greater volume of clicks, an off region click or two won't affect their eCPM as much, as opposed to small site eCPM, which tends to fluctuate more day to day.