Kontera Earnings In A Free-Fall
Posted on January 20, 2008
Filed Under Kontera
I’ve been using Kontera for about 9-months now and in that time I’ve probably been one of their most vocal fanboys. Starting out strong with an eCPM of over $3, and averaging $45-$75/day in earnings, I’ve recommended Kontera to everyone that will listen. Most webmasters that have tried Kontera based on my recommendation have reported back to me that it’s worked great for them - only a few have reported that it did not perform well for them at all. In general Kontera performs best on content-heavy sites like forums or “how-to” sites and does not do well on smaller sites, mini-sites, or MFA sites.
A Bad Month For Kontera
Starting in about mid-December of ‘07, my Kontera earnings and eCPM began to take a dip. Adsense was also down during this period, as well as traffic so I attributed the dip in earnings to “the holidays”. Beginning about the second week of January, traffic (and Adsense earnings) were getting back to normal - even above normal, but Kontera was still struggling to break $20/day, with an eCPM of less than $1. I sent an email to my account manager, asking him “WTF?!”, and he responds that publisher budgets and campaigns are down (normal for this time of year) but he was going to add the ‘consumer electronics’ category to my site which should help increase the eCPM.
Fast-forward to a few days ago and I realized that Kontera’s In-Text links are not even loading on my site - no, wait, they’re loading but they are taking over 45 seconds before they appear! I checked a few other sites that I know use Kontera (www.askdavetaylor.com) and notice that they are loading very slowly also (20-40 seconds). I send another email to my Account Manager and he responds that his operations people tell him they are doing and upgrade or something, and this might be causing the slow load times. Figuring that ad load-times this slow aren’t doing anyone any good, I removed Kontera from my site completely. The next day I see that Kontera is loading normally on other sites so I added it back.
This morning while checking earnings from yesterday I see that Kontera did not even break the $10 mark (eCPM hardly over $1) so I checked the load-times again and found that Kontera is taking over 30 seconds to appear on all my pages.
Combine low advertiser budgets and fewer campaigns with load-times of over 30 seconds and what do you get? You get no more Kontera ads on my website until they figure out how to correct these issues. I will monitor the ad-load times on other sites that use Kontera and test it on my site a few times for the next week or so before I go looking for a replacement.
C’mon Kontera, don’t make me go find another good PPC system.. Let’s get back to the good-old days of instant-loading In-Text ads, and normal eCPM.
**Update: 7 or 8 hours later and I decided to add Kontera back to the site to test it. The In-Text ads were loading fine for about an hour, but now they are back to taking 45 seconds or more before displaying. It seems that their adserver, kona19.kontera.com is what is causing the problem, because that’s where things seem to hang up.
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11 Responses to “Kontera Earnings In A Free-Fall”
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Come to the dark side that is adbrite…
Nuh, nuh, nooooooooo!!!!!!
And to think I was about to sign up for Kontera, thanks for the informative post. Make sure you tell us the second it starts working again, I’ve been looking for a way to ad a little extra revenue to my site.
Zac Davis said:
Hey Zac - just because it’s sucking for me does not mean you should not give it a try on your site. it might suck for you too, but, it might not!
i used kontera on my best site and wasn’t getting anything
I’m glad it’s not just me, my kontera earnings are 50% down on what I would expect base on past experience.
I have also noticed a drop in kontera impressions, even though my traffic is growing day by day although after reading your blog this could be down to kontera’s loading times.
Hello Randy,
My name is Mika and I’m a Publisher Services Manager from Kontera. I’m very sorry to hear the issue you’re describing. As you mentioned above we have been upgrading our system and advancing a long term improvement. This upgrade is not supposed to affect ad loading time.
Our optimization team is looking into your site to resolve any issue and you should hear from us soon.
Please recall that earnings in general are a little lower during the post-holiday season. Still, with a little work, we can bring those figures back up!
Thanks,
Mika
Publisher Services Manager
Kontera
[…] Randy Brown has a good post about how Kontera is not performing as well as it used to. […]
Wow its amusing to read a kontera rep doing damage control. They were on my ‘to signup to’ list, guess i can drop them off the list now, oh well, back to adbrite!
Kona18 and often kona19 indeed. Simply unstable and very annoying. Troubles started around the 11th of January. Kontera works fine.. if stable. Hopefully they solve this quickly.
I have been experiencing very similar problems with Kontera as well. The most annoying part of the whole thing is the lack of communication from Kontera. I found the new login via your post on DP, thanks.
I emailed my Kontera manager about the problems weeks ago, and still no reply. Their lack of communication is pathetic — even a post on their blog would be useful.