Fellow publishers, just wanted to share with you some results I've experienced recently with trying out both Chitika Linx in-text ads and Kontera ContentLink in-text ads, as I've been looking for an advertising system that can go with my AdSense ads to supplement my income. Based on my results with both Chitika and Kontera, if you haven't tried them out, you should do so. I've worked with Kontera in the past and my results weren't that great with them, but at the time my site wasn't getting very high traffic numbers. Now it is, and I've tried Chikita for the past 4 to 5 days and I gotta tell ya, it's definitely worth it as a supplement for AdSense, as it's brought in an amount equivalent to roughly 15% of my AdSense earnings for the past few days. I've heard some publishers say that Kontera has more advertisers or the Chikita is geared more toward technology-oriented sites; in my experience with Chikita, for a site that is in no way related to technology, the ads' relevance is pretty good -- better than Kontera's, in fact. Of course, there are good points and bad points to both. Here's a basic breakdown: Kontera The good: * VERY easy set-up and implementation * Easy ability to change font colors * Easy ability to turn off linking for text in bold (useful for avoiding linking in your headlines) The bad: * Ad relevance (for me) isn't so great, so you can get lots of strange ads * Slows down your page load time more than Chikita Chikita The good: * Much the same as Kontera's for set-up and customization of colors * Can use either dashed-line or double-line linking * Can control through the control panel the number of links that appear on the page The bad: * Sometimes links "cluster" together in a single sentence or line of text, rather than spread themselves out * Occasionally shows the same ads as AdSense advertisers All in all, the "bad" points of both systems are pretty minor -- I'm having a good experience with Chikita now, but I'd recommend trying both for a week, as Randy Brown has explained in this great post on his blog.
I don't like in-text ads. How about Chikita's other type of ads. Are they relevant and do they perform as good as AdSense?
Chitika's Premium ads is something you should look forward to EVEN if your website is not product based. It is CPC and and runs alongside Adsense. Just use different ad combinations to differentiate between them and adsense. The premium ads will ONLY show to USA or Canadian visitors coming from search engines. The alternative ad field specified in the premium ad code will allow you to redirect to another ad (maybe adsense or other cpm ads). This alternative ad will be shown to non US and Canada visitors. The premium ads are very relevant as it displays ads which related to what visitors type in the search engines instead of what content is displayed in that particular page. thus it is not contextual but instead searchtual..
I used Chikita Linx at a time and I had great experience with them, much better than Kontera, but I think they changed some rules, changed some CPC ads to CPM for some visitors so I stopped using them because I haven't earned much with CMP ads