Kontera - How to Not Make Money Online

Even after filing a report with the Better Business Bureau, Kontera is still refusing to pay my account balance. I honored the contract, as set forth in their terms of service, and gave 30 days notice before removing the tags from the website. Yet, they are claiming that I breached the contract because the impression levels dropped.

I had to move the Kontera tags out of the free website templates section on Themebot because the JavaScript tags were conflicting with either the AJAX scripting used in that section, or the caching mechanism, or a combination of all three. When a visitor would land on any page in the free website templates section while the Kontera tags were active, the first page load would be completely blank, there wasn't even anything in the source code. If I reloaded the page, then it would open correctly. I didn't even know that the Kontera script was causing a problem for some time (normally I am logged into the site, so I didn't see the effects of the caching with Kontera). I knew something was wrong because I saw my bounce rate spike during the period of time that the error started cropping up. It took a lot of time trouble-shooting this before I figured out that the Kontera script was causing the problem.

There is nothing in the Kontera terms of service that says anything about having to maintain a certain level of page impressions, and there is also nothing about having to place the tags on every single page. Furthermore, it is ridiculous to demand that a publisher keep the tags active in a certain section of a website if it is causing breakage. Totally irritating! I'm going to have to take them to small claims court and hopefully justice will be served.

Here is a link to the full article, which has a review of the Kontera ContentLink service and why not to use Kontera if you are trying to make money online. The article also explains why it is a good idea to avoid in-text advertising altogether.

Kontera - how to not make money online.

Where's your timeline of events, such as dates that emails were sent/received, the names of who you talked to, and paraphrasing of what was said ?

I primarily corresponded with Joshua in accounting. I have a complete record of all emails related to this starting from July 29, 2008.

Posting the content of communications is probably a bad idea due to strange copyright laws and EULA restrictions around these days, but adding your event timeline including the people dealt with during each communication and a paraphrasing of what each communication was about can do wonders for your cause.

I had a company screwing me around for what seemed like forever, but 5 days after posting my timeline somewhere that even today is within the top 5 results when searching for that companies name, I had a check in my mailbox. (PM me if you want a link to the thread)

On a side note, I wasn't happy with Kontera either.
I just dumped the code from my site and forgot about them since it hadn't made much anyways. I have a strange feeling a big part of their business model depends on publishers getting frustrated with them and leaving like I did, or waiting for publishers to fall through thin ice.

I pretty sure Bigwebmaster implemented Kontera ads here at Ozzu months ago for visitors who aren't logged in. It doesn't seem like he was pleased with their performance either because I didn't see any trace of them when I looked in another browser just now.

For me Kontera did pay every dollar that was owed even after removing the ads. I only did around a 1 month trial with them though. For the amount that was made with them I didn't feel it didn't meet the dollars required to keep them. The cost/benefit was not there. For everything it changes with the pages it was just not paying enough to make it worth keeping them. They claim its a supplemental income and was never intended as a primary ad income, but for what you give up with your visitors I think its not worth it.

I was hoping you would follow up on that Bigweb. Good stuff to know.

// Note: I changed the poll to allow selecting of multiple options.

@ joebert: Thanks for the advice. Considering that I filed a report with the BBB and they are still refusing to pay, I think paraphrasing the emails would probably be just more wasted time.

@Bigwebmaster: How did you manage to give 30 days notice if you only ran the ads for a month? Did you arrange that you were doing a 1 month trial ahead of time?

I'd really like to see all of the different in-text advertising services disappear completely. There needs to be a balance between site quality and monetization. In-text advertising really degrades websites, seems like it will eventually only be used for Splogvertising. I can't imagine that the quality of leads is very good either. Probably most clicks are accidental or visitors trying to get rid of the pop-up so they can keep reading. Hopefully, advertising partners will start bailing too.

Yeah it was arranged as a test with a higher percent payout to me, after which it would return to the regular rates that they normally pay. They just did that to give me an incentive to try their program. I was still not happy even with the higher percent and because of that decided not to continue. I simply pulled the ads and mentioned that if you can offer me a better deal in the future that I may be interested -- which if they were to offer a better deal I may try. Since they pay once a month my earnings were actually split into two different periods of which they paid everything owed from both periods.

From the start they said that it takes some time for the ads to be optimized and for it to start paying better. They said to give it I think at least 30 days to really see what it pays with everything optimized. For Ozzu I actually made more on the first few days and it continued to decrease over the month and it was well below what my expectations were. That was the primary reason for pulling the ads, for what it ended up paying I felt it was not worth all of the negative parts of having the ads displayed on ozzu -- out of all of the ad types I feel it comes right after annoying popups as the worst type of ads to have on a site. That was why in order to have it on the site I would want the payout to be well worth it. That was also why I refused to show the ads for registered members of which they tried to talk me into doing.

People probably figured out that the links weren't really links and got good at navigating the maze of double-underlines with their cursor after a few days.

I think my least favorite ads are popups, in-text and interstitial, in that order. No wait, there are some that make noise now. I saw one on Facebook recently for smilies. When you mouse over the banner, they talk to you. Those have to be the worst, especially if they catch you by surprise with your volume at max in a quiet public area

That's not the first time I've seen someone say that about them.

KONTERA, i had heard this for the first time...
Is it like adsense?
Thanks in advance..

well ...it's an alternative for adsense but pays less . The only benefit is that the TOS is not such strictly as Adsense have