Comments on: Stay Away from In-Text Advertising

By: David

David — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 05:32:49 +0000

I think the intext ads will be very annoying to the reader when trying to navigate the website

It is better to have banner ads after every 2nd post

By: brian laig

brian laig — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 15:24:26 +0000

i had to block all ads because of in-text ads. i mouse over everything i read and intext ands are so frustrating. to the point of nearly screaming or leaving the site. there needs to be an ad block just for pop over ads.

By: Rex Dixon

Rex Dixon — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:12:30 +0000

Anyone try any in text advertising A/B Testing? I’ve heard that Info Links is the best, but the only text advertising that works for me is TextLinkAds.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 04:42:35 +0000

With google adsense paying pennies, websites are looking for all the pennies they can muster.

Remember we put hours and hours into our sites and even have writers we need to pay.

A few text ads isn’t too much to ask – especially when you are viewing our sites for FREE.

🙂

By: Shad Vick

Shad Vick — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:10:45 +0000

Vibrant requires you to have 500,000 pageviews for the domain you wish to place the intext ads on. They know that if you don’t have a lot of good content – that neither of you are going to make money. Anyone with 500,000 page views hopefully has a credible site and wouldn’t want to tarnish their reputation with a bunch of “fake” links in their articles. This in text ad linking is for the junk sites that happen to have a lot of content. IMHO.

By: richard bel

richard bel — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:47:01 +0000

ive tried kontera and its terrible. i never want to put readers through that on my site ever again! Ads i believe are just ads and should be as unintrusive as possible . If they offer something users want ..they will click . no need for all this placing ads in the middle of content nonsense

By: Ash Blue

Ash Blue — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:01:14 +0000

I hate it when websites use this advertising technique. I click on links expecting relevant information and end up in an unknown website.

By: Muxx

Muxx — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 22:58:29 +0000

I have to agree after doing some testing over the last 2 months.

After playing around with Adsense, Chitika and other ad programs it just doesn’t do anything for the end user – the reader.

The main problem is that most of the text-link ads are completely irrelevant, it would be better if you could target words as part of an ad group but what often happens is they are attached to completely random words for totally unrelated products.

I blog about DJing and I would get text link ads for insurance, really?

I don’t think it really gives my readers any sort of benefit either. I work hard to write quality posts and then I send them away for a few pennies? Not on my blog, not anymore.

I do keep a small google ads on the very bottom of the post which generally does give me relevant ads but they’re not there to disrupt the flow of the article.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:24:44 +0000

There is something about the double line that seems to disturb design continuity. I think internet users are aware of it and mouse over when they want and skip when they don’t. The design element looks bad, in my opinion.

By: Gouri

Gouri — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:53:29 +0000

And I don’t think the return is encouraging either..

By: how to format a computer

how to format a computer — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:29:03 +0000

I’m about to try intext advertising on my site, honestly I don’t find intext advertising annoying (maybe a bit, when I accidentally mouse over a link).

@David I think the user would “waist” too much time while searching for the answer with the web search ? The point is advertising with google’s I’m feeling lucky function, but then again where will the revenue come from ?

By: Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:07:52 +0000

@David (word link 360 guy) no no no. One of the biggest flaws in inline ads is the complete disconnect between the article’s focus, and the ads. Grabbing any single word from within an article or other content and attempting to “know the intent, relationship or specific reference” of that is not possible.

The complete and entire reason to have links inline it for the content writer to provide specific, spot-on dead-accurate additional content that is purely and completely for the sole purpose of providing exactly related additional content or resource reference. To attempt anything else is to butcher the nature, reason and purpose of hypertext links within content.

By: David

David — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 02:25:36 +0000

I would like to get people’s opinion.

I just read everyone’s comments and it looks like most people are against the inline text ads that are currently out there.

I am a web developer and I have just developed a similar but different idea to use words on your website to generate revenue for the website owner and would like to get people’s opinion’s if they feel the same about my idea as they do about the typical inline text ads.

My idea turns your interesting words into a link that performs a web search on a search engine which then generates the website owner some revenue and provides the reader with additional, useful, and relevant information to the word they asked to know more about.

I am trying to follow the principle that we (I know I do) love clicking links on Wikipedia when I am reading an article to get more information and learn more about what I am reading about and I am applying the same principle to words on people’s websites.

Okay, that is the basic idea – Let me know what you think. Good and bad opinions.

You can check my site out at WordLink360.com

Thanks

By: danielM

danielM — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:55:51 +0000

I am using infolinks and had no problem with it, but lately my stats were zero in my infolinks account. I emailed them and they told me that it’s one technical problem that they are used to and will do something about it. 2 weeks after that and 3 emails after, no more repies and problem still unsolved. I’ll wait for another week before I’ll decide on removing them.

By: Master101

Master101 — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 11:11:27 +0000

Hmmm, I just try using INFOLINK. So i donno yet how it would effect my blog. I dont even know whether they approve it or not. I think i am gonna give it a try myself, before I can start saying:”Ho ho, it’s bad idea!”

By: Daniel Scocco

Daniel Scocco — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:56:32 +0000

@Jai, there isn’t much to say. She is just arguing that they pay good rates. So does popup ad networks, so it is up to the web publisher to decide how far he wanna go with monetization.

By: Jai Sharmy

Jai Sharmy — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:44:56 +0000

Where is Daniel’s reply to Katherine’s(of Kontera) comment?

By: Stephan

Stephan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:00:31 +0000

What an interesting article. I’ve seen in-text ads in a variety of places and I always thought that those types of ads were somewhat ineffiective. After reading this article and the comments, it seems in-text advertising is more than ineffiective, its danergous.

Thanks for the warning.

By: I Love Free Software

I Love Free Software — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:46:07 +0000

Here is a small update that I wanted to share since my last comment. I kept Infolink on my blog for 2 days. Surprisingly, I did not get even a single Adsense click on those 2 days. Absolutely zero. My personal conclusion is that even though such in-text advertising is claimed to be non-obtrusive, it still gets attention because such text is formatted differently (double-underlined). This draws the attention away from the main article ads.

This is my purely personal conclusion – but the findings of those 2 days were enough to convince me to get rid of in-text advertizing. I wanted in-text to earn some money in addition to Google ads – not to reduce earnings by Google ads themselves.

I might still use Infolinks on longer articles, when user is watching some portion of screen which does not have any other ad (by using conditional in-text advertizing on and off), and see how do the results perform then. Will again share the findings here.

By: Alan Bleiweiss

Alan Bleiweiss — Mon, 18 May 2009 03:09:26 +0000

Daniel

Thanks for the blog post. I’ve been seeing in-text ads for a while now and think it’s a very negative model. Polluting the concept of hypertext is surely the first issue. And as others have said, it’s intrusive and obnoxious to say the least. What’s worse, the contextual relationship between an article’s focus, the word that becomes a link, and the offerings are quite often stupid.

Like today I came across a tech article on GPUs and CPUs. One of the words highlighted was “drivers” (like in computer system drivers) – and the ad linked to an environmental company page talking about annual emission reports for vehicles.

OMG that disgusts me.

By: I Love Free Software

I Love Free Software — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:10:27 +0000

Hmmm.. quite interesting article. I have recently implemented text link ads on my website, and want to give them a fair chance for a couple of months. I am not sure if they are obtrusive, but agree that they can dilute the website navigation. One change I made is to implement these only on single post pages, and not on home page, or category pages, as they have all the hyperlinks, and don’t want those hyperlinks to be confused with in text ads.

Let’s see how do my links perform 🙂

By: Julius

Julius — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:19:51 +0000

This is quite an intriguing article, and quite helpful, especially for novice bloggers like me. This is something that kept me thinking because I use infolinks on my site. I’ll be thinking this over and thanks for sharing this.

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 04:24:30 +0000

Wow I disagree with this post. I own a “mainstream” discussion forum. We use in-text ads for guests only, not members, and generate about $5k each and every month from about 1 Million monthly users. Depends on the size of your site, type of site etc but don’t discount the whole model because you have a tiny blog that makes $5/mo from in-text — that’s not always the case for all publishers.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:31:47 +0000

Hi, an interesting thread but what about your thoughts about the reputation of the Advertisers – would you think less of the company/organisation or, in my case, not-for-profit using in-text adverts?

I run a website for a UK NGO. We already have a Google Adwords programme but I was interested in experimenting with in-text ad’s to drive more people to our site. I think it could work really well as not many other NGOs are doing it and many of our key words will not be taken yet.

Would it put you off making a donation, for example?

Thanks,
Joe

By: Essay Writing

Essay Writing — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:16:39 +0000

Ah, now I am really confused at to what to do here, as I too was about to sign up to kontera, moments before I read this blog.

Possibly I will try one of them like brandclik first and report back with the results.

By: Nick Niesen

Nick Niesen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:41:54 +0000

You should put in-text ads on this page, it would be hilarious.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:15:33 +0000

I think adwords usually gets 1/10th of a percent to about 1 percent depending on the venue but you will have to ask Google to chime in… 🙂

By: Joshua

Joshua — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:14:32 +0000

I can tell you that our CTR’s vary based on the type of publisher.

-Newspapers can expect = .5% – 8% depending on the article and the words in it

-Social Networks = .75%-3% – depending on the location of the ads

-Blogs = .5%-2% – again depends on the content and the blogs popularity.

We have seen with some publishers who white-label the service double digit numbers consistantly

Thank you,

By: nico

nico — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:19:40 +0000

I wonder what is the average CTR compared to the average CTR of adwords (for the same keywords)

By: Bang Kritikus

Bang Kritikus — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 02:46:42 +0000

What are different about in-text and text link ads ???

By: Joshua

Joshua — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:34:44 +0000

We had an employee who worked with us who’s name was Dee…

Nothing misleading about the same name is there?

Good luck and if you change your mind we would be happy to help you at BrandClik.

Take care,

By: Dee

Dee — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:33:13 +0000

I just checked in on this forum again and saw that “Joshua” wrote on August 27, 2008, “I work with Lowell and Dee at Brandclik.” I wanted to refute that. After I posted on March 21, 2008, someone named “Lowell” posted on March 27 saying he was contacting me at my e-mail address, apparently to give me the benefits of using Brandclik over other in-text networks. I did receive an e-mail from him but I never responded to it, and never signed up for Brandclik, nor have I have ever worked for or had any connection with Brandclik.

It’s definitely misleading of Brandclik “employees” to say that I work with them, and by inference lead readers to believe that I endorse them. I haven’t changed my opinion of in-text advertising and I still do not use it on my web site.

By: Mikael Rieck

Mikael Rieck — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:49:36 +0000

Personally I think it is a great way to advertise and I find it a lot less annoying than banners and 125×125 ads (animated is the worst kind).

The only thing that goes against the in text ads is that a lot of them really aren’t relevant. With Kontera more than half of them are for Web Dictionaries and has nothing to do with the topics.

If there was a way to make 100% of the ads relevant I would definitely use it on most of my sites.

By: Cwd

Cwd — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:54:13 +0000

In-text advertising slows down page load times. It may also hang browsers of users who have slow internet connection.

I used them on my site until I went fed up with load times and removed them altogether.

By: arshad

arshad — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 17:17:41 +0000

so is there any disadvantage as far as seo is concerned ? i hope not .

By: Ahsan

Ahsan — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:45:21 +0000

Right now Kontera does not seem to have enough ads.
Can somebody explain the difference between AdBrite’s in text advertising and Kontera?

By: Credit Helper

Credit Helper — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:59:09 +0000

Sounds like in-text links can be useful if your intent is to get users to a specific page rather than to get them to focus on your content.

By: DnDCorner

DnDCorner — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 00:30:08 +0000

Thanks for posting this article. As a new blogger looking for the best ways to increase traffic and revenue this was very informative and certainly gives me something to think about.

By: Alfie

Alfie — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:57:22 +0000

How about the adsense link units? Would it be also an intrusive ad? An unaware reader might assumed that it is part of the navigation links.

By: Joshua

Joshua — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:10:01 +0000

I work with Lowell and Dee at BrandClik and want to chime in and provide a few of the many reasons advertisers should also want to participate.

Advertisers can…

1) See the pricing structure of all the participating newspapers, bloggers, and social network sites we have in our database prior to putting any money into an account. Registration is completely free.

2) They can opt in or out of anyone of the content providers or all of them or none of them at will.

3) Since our program is not a bidding system like Kontera and VibrantMedia all corporate trade name or brand names are completely protected. Even if Kontera signed up with BrandClik no one else in our system can bid on that keyword since they own that trade name.

These are just a few of the reasons advertisers are registering with us.

Thank you,

Joshua

By: Article Alley

Article Alley — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:14:03 +0000

I’m going to be controversal and say that Kontera can work well and be valuable. It depends on the type of site you have and why people use it.

I run an article bank 99% of visitors come from searching a phrase that matches either the title or content of the article pages. The CTR of Konera and Adsense are about the same – and Kontera does not impact at all on the Adsense earnings.

Most users are actually looking for a service or product matching the content they read and actually find the links both Kontera and Adsense of value because in general ( OK mostly ) the links take them to somewhere which offers them a solution.

If your site’s aim is to build regular visitors then I agree that in link services are not a good idea.

By: Personal Debt Adviser

Personal Debt Adviser — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 06:48:23 +0000

Thanks very much for this. I’m setting up a new blog and was seriously considering using the intellitext advertising for what I thought might be a good experience for the end user. I’ll go with the masses on this one then.

By: Breck

Breck — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:48:49 +0000

Ashish, you had a typo in your stristr function. It should be strstr, not stristr….

By: Claude Gelinas

Claude Gelinas — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:50:42 +0000

I’ve tried in-text advertising in a (serious) “business tips” web site with roughly 100 very interested users a day for three (3) months.

The visitors were 90% based in the United States and read 4.2 pages, on average. My revenue for the entire period with Kontera was 19 cents.

I wanted to give some time to my users to get familiar with this new type of advertising but after 3 months, I decided it was enough and this type of advertising wasn’t going to work for me.

In-text advertising is probably good for other web publishers because I see it here and there but obviously, it didn’t work out too well for me.

This being said, the support people at Kontera were nice. Useless in helping me generate more revenue but nevertheless, quite nice. It’s worth noting.

By: SEO Genius

SEO Genius — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:15:03 +0000

I absolutely hate in text advertising!!! aghh it drives me insane, it looks so tacky and stupid and its just annoying. grrr gets my angry just thinking about it 😀

By: Katherine

Katherine — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:58:20 +0000

Hi All,

I am a business development associate at Kontera and appreciate your comments. In-text advertising is becoming a very common way for publishers to monetize their sites (seen on sites like Shape.com, JohnChow.com, Britannica.com) and users are getting more and more used to it. The expansion of the ad on mouse over is so that people do not confuse our ads with a normal hyperlink as they may services that don’t have an expanded ad on mouse over. If your site is seeing lower CPCs that is probably because you have a lot of international traffic which we pay for compared to other networks that dont pay for it at all (take into account the overall revenue rather than the just the CPCs). You can always request to just have your US, UK traffic monetized so that you will see much higher CPCs. Please contact me at katherine@kontera.com if you have any further questions.

Thanks,
Katherine

By: BrandClik.com

BrandClik.com — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:57:22 +0000

I work with Lowell at BrandClik and I think the fact that some newspapers are registering for our service while not registering for the others mentioned above means that the newspapers feel our opportunity is the least intrusive format to date with the highest return.

Anyway, 2 more newspapers to report:

http://www.NKCNEWS.com

http://www.WNPApolitics.com

Thanks!

By: Lowell

Lowell — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:04:23 +0000

By: Sinisa

Sinisa — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:39:37 +0000

I am looking at this form a consumer point and as a media buyer.
I could not disagree more with the premise of this article. I would say this is the least intrusive kind of advertising. Hyperlinks are underlined twice so no one can mistake it for a regular link. If consumers don’t know what the double underline means – Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice…- well you get the picture. Also considering that these ads are graphically non demanding it seems to me that they would reduce your bandwidth use. The only downfall is that it can sometimes make the website look `cheep’.
The most annoying type of advertising are flash banners that spread over 50% of the page when you mouseover, and many times mouseover you must in order to navigate. Same with in page popup and animations that run across the screen as you are trying to read the article. I also hate ads in the middle of the text which you can “skip” by clicking on the link that takes you to the bottom of the ad.

By: Lowell

Lowell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:50:50 +0000

Dee-
We just sent you a message regarding BrandClik to the Juno e-mail address that is on your site. Please feel free to contact us regarding our services.

Thanks,
BrandClik