For those of you who are not familiar with Kontera, it is a way to monetize your site by automatically adding hyperlinks to keywords within your text, which when clicked on, take readers to ads related to that word.

Here are the features of the plugin according to the Kontera blog:

• It automatically configures their Java Script to analyze the main text body and stay away from areas of your header, footer, and sidebar.
• Can be integrated into either WordPress or WordPress MU, and in the case of WordPress MU, the plugin enables the site administrator to configure revenue sharing.

I personally find Kontera to be a sneaky way to monetize a site, although many disagree. Here is the comment I posted on the TechCrunch post about their second round of financing:

I think Kontera is just plain sneaky. First of all, it looks almost exactly like a hyperlink. When I first came across them I remember clicking by mistake only to find some annoying ad in my face.

Second, don’t tell me that people are clicking on those ads because they’re interested in the advertised product. There’s no advertisement there – it’s just a word. Seeing the word “Ford” in a sentence does not mean I want to see an ad about it.

Basically, they don’t earn the clicks, and to me that’s sneaky.

But many bloggers swear by it as a way to monetize, and who knows – I may change my mind at some point.

So I’ve decided to give Adsense a serious go here at wpgarage. I read up on it a bit, and took some time to choose certain ad types for certain locations on the page.

So far so good. And I can see that people are clicking.

But here’s where it gets really frustrating: my stats program shows that people are clicking on ads, but these clicks aren’t showing up in the Google Adsense reports. And the few clicks that are showing up in the reports aren’t making any money!

This is annoying, but even worse it strengthens my suspicion that Google can basically do whatever they want and we’d never know. Google could be charging the advertisers for the clicks on their ads without fairly paying me for providing the advertising real estate!

So some questions:

1. Does anyone know why Google doesn’t pay out for clicks? I read somewhere that it’s because they deem such clicks as problematic or fraudulent. If so, what is this based on?
2. Is there any type of checks and balances system where we can verify that if Adwords advertisers are being charged for clicks, Adsense users are being fairly compensated?
3. There are so many monetization systems out there – any suggestions for other systems besides Adsense?

I can see this monetization thing is not going to be so easy…

1. Daily Blog Tips has a blogger face-off between Brian Gardner and Cory Miller and asks them for their opinions on a number of topics. One of the questions asked is “Do you think Adsense units make a blog look unprofessional?” Both of them basically said that if they are professionally designed and placed, they are not unprofessional.
2. On the other hand, The Real Estate Tomato gives 7 compelling reasons why AdSense will ruin your blog. These include that AdSense cheapens your blog, can display inappropriate ads, wastes valuable (blog) real estate, and may even be blocked by Firefox Adblock.

The question is, do those of us in the anti-AdSense camp dislike it because we don’t know how to use it properly, or is it truly an eyesore?

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Besides the clutter, I think that AdSense ads are just plain ugly. I don’t care if you’ve customized the border and background to match the color scheme of your site; they are still ugly. I’ve come across blogs with appealing designs, but you can barely see the design for the AdSense!

This blog is my first attempt at adding AdSense to a site. While the process is pretty straightforward, I have to say that I think the ads are an eyesore. The only ad that I think is pretty is the one for Firefox with Google Toolbar. I put that one because even though it probably has less of a chance of making me any money, at least it looks nice.

I don’t mind ads per say, as long as they are non-intrusive and attractive. For example, Tech Crunch has all these pretty square ads at the top-left of the page. They actually even have Google AdSense, but they’ve kept it to a minimum and have placed it in a non-intrusive, ad-appropriate place.

For now I’m leaving the ads on this site because I’m curious to see if they’re worth anything. But if they don’t perform, or Google doesn’t introduce anything prettier, they’ll probably come down. My primarily goal with blogging is not necessarily to make money directly off my site (although that would be nice); it’s more to make connections with the other amazing bloggers out there, and to hopefully give something back to the web so that I can help others, just as I’ve been helped by the web.

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