Is Kontera A Good Way To Monetize HubPages?

Let me start by answering that question. The short answer, IMHO, is "NO", Kontera is not a good choice to monetize HubPages.

Now, let me explain myself. I've used Kontera on a number of high traffic sites. At first I thought it would be a very good alternative to Google Adsense. I was wrong. It wasn't. I ended up trying it on weight loss sites and make money sites. Each click that I did get was in the 2 to 7 cent range. On an outdoor sports site, when the ads were clicked, I received clicks of 17 and 20 cents a few times, very few!

Now understand, these sites received over 2000 unique visitors per day. One received over 4 thousand per day. I guess I got greedy and tried to find something that paid more than Adsense, but I learned a very valuable lesson. Kontera didn't work on any of my sites. I can't prove it, but I believe it may have even drove some visitors away who didn't like the looks of the hpyerlinked words all over my pages.

I believe the biggest thing that Kontera has going against it is how it works. When you sign up with Kontera and they accept you, you'll install a program on your website. In the case of HubPages, they do it for you automatically. All you have to do is supply the Kontera account number.

Once that is in place, Kontera will highlight words on your HubPages that they have advertisers for. For example, if you had a Campng site, and Kontera had advertisers for camp stoves and lanterns, then each time the words "camp stoves" and "lanterns" showed up on your page, Kontera's program would highlight those words, generally with highlighted lines above and below the words. (you have control over the colors of this highlighting to improve click through's on your website)

If Kontera has quite a few advertisers for whatever the subject of your page is, then it's likely that you'll have these highlighted, hyperlinked words all over your page. In some instances, when your cursor moves over one of the words, a preview popup will appear. Sometimes this popup is a text ad. Either way, just having all those highlighted hyperlinked words on your page is annoying to many visitors. Not to mention all those tiny popups if your cursor comes into contact with them.

The second thing that I think hurst Kontera is apparently either their payout percentage of the advertising revenue or the prices they charge advertisers. Either way, from my experience, it's not trickling down to the publishers. I also know several other Internet Marketers who've used them and know none who are currently using it.

This is just something to consider if you're wondering whether or not Kontera is a good choice to monetize your HubPages.

I get this question a lot both here on HubPages and in other forums. I can't honestly say how much you can make with Kontera. Their payouts vary from keyword to keyword just like Adsense. I'm assuming that just like Adsense, advertisers pay Kontera a fee to advertise on their network. It seems obvious to me that the advertisers pay less on the Kontera network than with Adsense.

This translates into lower pay outs with Kontera in my opinion. As I said earlier, I never could make this program work for me, and I have some high traffic, high converting sites. My weight loss site does pretty good with Adsense. I have pretty high conversion rates and most of the traffic is organic. So you can see why I was really hoping Kontera would increase both my conversion rate and my paycheck, but it didn't happen. After two months of a lot lower earnings, I had to switch back to Adsense.