I received this email today from Ian Traynor about Kontera, a novel way of monetizing content-oriented websites. I haven’t yet tested it on our web design clients, but it seems very interesting at first glance especially if you are looking for PPC revenues or cost reductions. Unlike Google’s AdSense program, which places highly visual advertisements (ie. adverts) on your web pages, Kontera scans the words on a web page and, if it finds a word which one of its advertisers has bid for, it hyperlinks the word with a double underline. When the website visitor hovers over the word, a small popup appears next to the word with the a.dvert.
If the visitor then cl.icks on the a.d, the website owner gets a small commission.
In the past Google’s Terms of Service (“TOS”) would not allow you to use this type of contextual a.dvertising on the same page that you were running AdSense. However, the TOS has now been changed so it is “legal” to run both types of a.dverts.