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While these days everyone is obsessed with online video and video monetization, text remains the most common form of content on the web and still represents the largest advertising opportunity.
When it comes to monetization of text, we have experienced a slow evolution: at first there were banners - Yahoo was king. Then, Google introduced sponsored listings and “adorned’ every corner of the web. Today, In-text or in-content advertising is the new frontier. Rather than taking real estate from the page with massive graphics or piles of ads, this new model of advertising leverages the existing content on the site by embedding ads in words, in the form of “non-obtrusive and informational” links, mostly recognized by a double underline.
Amongst the contenders for the crown of in-text advertising is Israel’s Kontera. Michael Eisenberg of Benchmark Israel had listed Kontera as one of the top 10 most valuable internet startup, so my curiosity was sparked when the company contacted me (through their diligent PR agency) and asked me to take a closer look at the Kontera’s technology.
Kontera’s Background
Kontera was founded by CEO Yoav Shaham in 2003. The company raised about $17 million in two rounds in the past couple of years. Main backers are Sequoia, Carmel and Lehman Brothers.
Kontera’s patent- pending contextual analysis technology offers web site owners a JavaScript tag to include in the code of their pages, allowing it to analyze content in real time and pick out links judged to be the most appropriate keywords for advertising.
What’s the latest with Kontera?
A short research reveals that Kontera has been focused hard on distribution:We covered Kontera’s recent partnership with LinkedIn a few months ago. In May the company released a controversial Wordpress plugin, followed by a one-click Blogger plugin in June.
Most recently, Kontera launched Hybrid, a customizable, In-Text media layer that enables publishers to place links to related content next to an ad within one In-Text unit.
You can see sample integrations of Kontera Hybrid here:
motorauthority.com
Or here: http://www.mensfitness.com/fitness/136
The company reports that so far, while typical online ads are generating click-through rates between
0.05 -0.5%, Kontera is seeing the following results for Hybrid:
a. 20 – 30% user engagement rate – more than 1 in 5 users who mouse over a highlighted link for Kontera’s new Hybrid unit are clicking on one of the links
b. 3.5 – 5% CTR (click through rate). So basically, an average of 4% of users who get to a page with the Hybrid unit click on one of the links
c. 2.5 – 4% increase in page views for publishers running Kontera’s new Hybrid unit, which translates into an incremental increase in ad revenue
While I don’t fully understand where the increased page views are coming from, these numbers are pretty good, compared to a Google Adsense integration. When was the last time that you have clicked on a Google ad and bough something?
UPDATE: I got a clarification from Kontera on the increased page views:
The increase in page views comes from the fact that users who click on links to related content from the same publisher in the Hybrid unit. For example, with the Hybrid units on Men’s Fitness, the links to related content are links to other articles deemed contextually relevant according to Kontera’s textual analysis technology from Men’s Fitness.com. It is these clicks which generate the increase in page views.
 Read about Kontera In-Text on VC Cafe
Find out more about Kontera's website advertising tools
Visit the Kontera Blog for more on blog advertising
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