This is an absolutely brilliant concept and an atrocious implementation of that concept. Which is getting progressively worse over time since the script is now over three times the huge size it had when I first wrote this review.
Publisher's Site
Pros
- A Great idea for producing unobtrusive ads.
Cons
- Only works in some web browsers.
- Adds a huge 41k Javascript to each web page whether the browser supports it or not.
- Relies on correct CSS in both web page and browser for the page to display properly
- pays out only in US dollar cheques
- Selected link words often taken completely out of context.
Description
- Kontera is a provider of In-Text Advertising Solutions.
- The service finds keywords on your web page and matches them to In-Text sponsored keyword links.
- Provides a way to monetize the content of your web pages.
- "Works" in Internet Explorer and Firefox only.
- Payments made monthly by US cheque when balance exceeds $100.
- Simple to install, just add a call to a huge javascript to the bottom of your web pages.
Guide Review - Kontera In-Text Advertising Script
The idea of this advertising script is that several words in the actual web page content are converted into special links. When your visitor hovers over one of these links a small advertising tooltip appears. That tooltip contains a small amount of advertising copy and a link to click on for further information. This allows advertising to be added to a web page which is both unobtrusive and which visitors are likely to click on.
Unfortunately Kontera's implementation of this using JavaScript just doesn't work. To add their advertising to your web page requires that you add a JavaScript call to the bottom of your web page (the wrong place to put JavaScripts to start with) and that ridiculously huge JavaScript contains an enormous switch statement which selects which ads to attach to which words in the web page. What's more the script only works for certain web browsers but gets loaded along with the page regardless of which browser is being used.
Here is a concept just crying out for an Ajax implementation to do server side lookups for the ad content and while everyone else is using Ajax where it is not needed Kontera have decided not to use it for a function where it is the ideal solution.
The most unfortunate thing about the whole approach is that a number of significant web sites have implemented this advertising and so you are stuck with the huge download for each page on those sites unless you update your firewall or hosts file to block them.
Publisher's Site