Google AdSense ads have become ubiquitous. It's hard to find many sites that aren't running their contextual text advertisements.
However, there ARE other options available for site publishers wishing to monetize their web pages. I recently came across a site called Kontera. They have a different approach to contextual advertising. Rather than display ads directly on the site, their engine looks at a web page and highlights certain keywords on the page by placing a double blue line underneath the word.
You might even see an example of this on this web page. Simply run your mouse over the link, and voila, advertisement that may provide additional useful information for my readers. Try it!
If you own a site, you may want to take a look at putting Kontera on your pages.
AdSense has given me a very healthy income. It funds my mortgage, makes the payments on my car, gives me some very nice vacations and does a whole lot more. I'm very grateful to Google for the big checks that they send me every month.But if someone were to give me bigger checks, I'd be off AdSense in a flash.
Disloyal? Maybe. But I prefer to think of it as an appreciation for healthy competition. If someone wants me to sign up with their program instead of Google’s, they have to beat Google’s revenues and services. At the moment nobody’s doing that.
Yahoo! makes a pretty good alternative if, for one reason or another, you lose your AdSense eligibility, and Kanoodle have some potential too. But neither looks like it can give me what Google is giving me.
There is another company though could have the ability to give Google a run for its money: Kontera.
Kontera has actually been in the keyword business for about six years but their AdLinks program is only now beginning to gather steam. Instead of putting ad units on a Web page and sending ads with some relevance to the site’s content, AdLinks highlights particular words already in a publisher’s text and presents ads in a floating tool tip only when a user mouses over. That means advertisers are getting users with a strong interest in their products, publishers are getting highly targeted ads and users are getting an uninterrupted surfing experience in which calling up ads can actually be fun.
Sounds good to me but the bottom line — as always — is in the revenues.
I’ve started testing AdLinks in a small way on a couple of my sites and the results so far have been impressive. Not outstanding — certainly not as exciting as the revenues on AdSense — but pretty good so far.
And AdLinks also gives plenty of freedom for optimization, something I’ve barely touched so far.
At the moment it’s not entirely clear whether Google considers putting AdLinks on the same pages as AdSense to be a breach of their TOS. Some publishers have reported that Google have given them permission; others say Google has told them they need to take it off.
Although they’re both contextualized advertising, the two systems look pretty different. If Google agrees, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be complementary. And if Google doesn’t agree, they’d better hope that Kontera doesn’t start writing very big checks.
