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Kontera was a really good income stream up to December 2007. That’s because something happened in January 2008 that turned Kontera into a wussy of a money trickle. Here’s what happeneed.

I ALWAYS experiment with Adsense ad placements and formats. This is to counter ad blindness as much as it is to optimize Adsense as much as possible. Well in January 2008, I found that the half-banner which once used to perform pretty well on my main Adsense website started to suck major lemons. eCPM was going down the tubes and so was CTR. I decided to kill the half banner and replaced it with the large rectangle format. Now what happened since has really surprised me.

Although purists would crucify me for plastering a whole slab of Adsense on my homepage, that fella has been out performing ALL my ad blocks on ALL pages collectively. The thing is as this is happening, I’ve found that the bounce rate for this page has increased in tandem with the rise in earnings. Obviously people are arriving at this page, seeing this whopper of an ad block and just clicking on it. The sorry victim in all this is Kontera, which I use for all my sub pages.

Now, I expected that earnings from Kontera would dip with the rise in clicks on the large rectangle Adsense block, but it has actually crashed and gone erratic. The chart below shows my daily earnings in the last 2 weeks or so :

What was happening was unbelievable… I was starting to see earnings of 10 cents for 10 clicks or more! Now that’s bad. Where I used to be able to earn an average of 15 to 20 cents per click, I’ve been seeing a major increase in 1 cent or less per clicks the last few months. The peaks you see in the chart above are nothing to brag about. We’re talking about less than $1 here. To illustrate how bad Kontera is performing now, I have only just managed to pass the $100 mark at the end of May 2008. That’s 5 months to reach $100 - an average of $20 per month or 66 cents a day! Since this has been happening over the course of a few months, it is telling me that one or more of the following is true :

Kontera’s advertiser pool is shrinking - hence the low eCPM and EPC.
Kontera is somehow able to see my visitors prefer clicking on Adsense so they’re punishing me for giving priority to Adsense (this is a conspiracy theory. I cannot prove it)
It’s just market forces at play and market forces are saying my site deserves 1 cent clicks.
Now it’s not pride here. I cannot accept the third possibility BECAUSE since deploying the large rectangle Adsense block, my EPC has actually increased by almost 60%. To see if the market as a whole was weakening, I decided to give LinkWorth a try. I’ll talk more about LinkWorth in a separate post later, but in the 3 weeks or so that I’ve been with LinkWorth, I am very pleased with my earnings so far.

So the bottom line is… I am not going to waste my web real estate on Kontera anymore. I’ve been patient enough. Five months is enough I think. Later this week, I’m going to convert all the pages that were once reserved for Kontera to Linkworth.