KONTERA SUCKS: After 7-Months Earning 71 Dollars with Half Million Net Impressions!

Sometime earlier this year, from a post at this forum: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=244331&highlight=Kontera Kontera Advertising network lowered her entry barrier by allowing low traffic blogs, sponsored by ‘big boys’ like Joel Comm and John Chow to come on board.

I was a product of that arrangement. After seven good months (February to September 2007) of running Kontera on the #1 Telenovela blog in the world, I feel it is time to critically review the Kontera ‘generosity’.

My Sitemeter statistic for these seven months showed that my blog generated a pageview of over one million (1,164,077), and thank God, Kontera acknowledged a net page impression of a little over half million (503, 831) for the same period.

What was the revenue for this period? A “whopping” $71 Dollars! generated by some 2,500 clicks!!! effective cost per thousand net impression hovered around 14 cents, and CTR averaged 0.5%.

I don’t need any soothsayer to conclude that KONTERA SUCKS!!!

For that same period I have made some cool thousands bucks from Google Adsense, and a monthly average of $150 bucks from Voxant NewsRoom. A couple of hundreds from Pay per posts monthly.

What baffled me was not the ‘awesome’ revenue of Kontera, despite my high net page impressions, (very few but notable bloggers, maybe, 50 at most, on the blogosphere, generate my kind of pageviews).

John Chow was reporting a constant revenue from Kontera in his famous monthly Blog income reports, regardless of higher or lower page impressions. He never once gave a breakdown of how much he made from Kontera Content Links, as different from his affiliate income from same.

It’s amazing how many big-name PPC advertising networks are out there without integrity, who feed fat on the labor of their publishing blogger partners.

There is nothing that I have not done with Kontera optimization, but it never deliver any significant income for me. Am I a victim of affiliate scam? If anybody joined Kontera through Joel Comm if February and have made significantly more Kontera income than me, please SPEAK UP Now!

 

I think it all depends on the content of the blog/site. I am having a (almost) constant eCPM of around $1.40 on kontera for last 6/7 months. And I am also talking about similar number of page impressions as you.

 

yeah, very low pay... same here

 

And same here.. contera pays low

 

I left Kontera about a year ago due to its outrageously low payouts. I averaged around a cent per three clicks, and I even tried different niches as well.

 

if your so unhappy about their pay,why did you stay with them for 7 months?

 

I dunno, Kontera's been good to me. Considering it doesn't take up any extra room it's great imo.

 

John Chow is a hack who makes most if not all of his money from affiliate marketing. If you follow his advice your doomed to failure as all he suggests is ventures that directly make him money.

 

If you are into a good niche and have good click thru rate, then you can contact them for fixed CPM rates. I have many of my sites with them with $1.70 fixed CPM rate. but if your site is not performing, they can't help you even if they want.

 

I was thinking the same thing. Why not just drop them?

 

Much as I would have loved to drop Kontera, I would not want to lose my 71 Dollars, so, I would wait till I get to the threshold of 100 Dollars pay-out before leaving. That is why I call it a PPC trap. Imagine 3,000 dissatisfied publishers leaving behind an average $40 for Kontera? That is $120 GRAND!

I would also explore jimkarter's sound counsel to negotiate a fixed CPM rate with Kontera, since my blog is performing very well.

 

I now see what you mean mate. To be honest, Kontera isn't performing much worse then Adsense on the one blog I have it on. But there are a lot of 5 cent clicks.

 

maybe my math is off, but to say that you're among only 50 or so bloggers to generate 1 million pageviews in seven months seems very odd.

for one, many popular bloggers receive over 100k unique visitors a day, that's not counting pageviews. that would be 21 million unique visitors in 7 months. that's visitors, not pageviews. if you count pageviews, it's much much higher.

i also highly doubt that the top 50 bloggers in the world are receiving less then $5k over the course of 7 months (i'm using the round figure of $5k because that seems to be a close proximation of your combined income) . i have a couple of sites at around 50k alexa and i'm getting over $2k a month, and that's just running adbrite ads, nothing else.

i could be missing something here, but i'm sure there's thousands of bloggers with better traffic numbers, rather then just 50.

 

gardinal,

Don't slap me with angry maths. You need to go to Darren Rowse's problogger or John Chow's or Joel Comm's Adsensechat forum to see a poll of blogger's income and traffic/page views, to know that there are not 200 bloggers on the net who generate 10k-20k pageviews per day. The 80-20 pareto rules all of us. my result is modest and above average, don't despise it.

forget the figure, i was simply saying that i am proud to be part of the 20% top bloggers. you need to study and interact, to know that many blogger fellows out there are still crawling and buying all manner of traffic secrets e-books that deliver no traffic or income for them.

please, leave Alexa out of the argument, i write soap opera stories (telenovela), which the average household watch daily. 95% of my visitors have never heard the word alexa. they are neither bloggers nor techies. I am a student of Darren Rowse.

 

Philomena your English is better then mine and it's my first language.

Good luck with reaching the $100 threshold and bailing out

 

i'm not 'slapping you' with angry math, i was merely trying to figure out how the numbers correlate to your being in the top 50 of all bloggers in the world. i mean, you do know that there are millions of bloggers, right? to say you're in the top 20% means you're in the top few hundred thousand, not 50. i know many bloggers who receive tons more traffic and tons more money.

if i haven't even cracked the top 50k alexa, and am receiving close to a million pageviews a month, it's hard to see how you're in the top 50 and need 7 months to reach the same number.

i don't know what your definition of a blogger is, but there are far more then 200 who receive 20k+ pageviews a day. maybe your definition of a blogger is different then mine? in the category of porn blogs alone there's at least 10k bloggers who receive more then 20k pageviews a day.

as far as alexa is concerned, it's not a perfect tool for measuring traffic, but unless everybody wants to publish their traffic stats it's the best tool there is, and, throwing out the cheaters, it does accurately reflect the popularity of a website in comparison with another site; sites that are top 10k alexa are much more popular then top 50k sites, without any question.

i didn't respond to your thread to throw any accusations at you, i was only trying to figure out where your figures come from because they're at odds with what i am certain is true. i genuinely thought maybe there was something i was missing, and that you might tell what that is. if there's no other facts for you to add in regards to your claims, i'd have to call bs.

other then that, your post about kontera is very illuminating and has convinced me to stay away from them.

 

I used Kontera for over a year and had moderate success with them, you can always email them and ask for advice on how to improve things, I find them to be very helpful like that. I did eventually switch to a similar product from Chitika as I found for my niche their CPC was a fair bit higher.

To add to the top 50 debate my blog does well over a million page views a month and I wouldn't class it in the top 50 traffic wise

 

Those traffic numbers would not even put you in the top 1,000 overall. Kontera does have some very low payouts, but on the right site they can work well and in my experience they do not lower Adsense CTR.

 

If you have noticed, John Chow's income for kontera is consistently $1000 in his income report... Very likely that Kontera has an agreement with him to use kontera as a marketing tool for his blog readers?

 

Charleslau yes John has an agreement with them. Whenever he makes less than $1000 in a month they raise his income to exactly $1000. If he makes more he gets what he earns.

Since he always posts $1000 as his income his Kontera income can not be greater than $1000.