In-text ads: Pure evil

(Click to enlarge)

Kontera Technologies — motto: Creating In-Text Relevance! — contacted me the other day about advertising possibilities on the New Media Musings blog. Which is fine. Except that what they’re offering isn’t the usual text or banner or pop-up ads. They want to embed text ads right in the middle of the editorial copy.

I know that Weblogs Inc.’s Jason Calacanis calls these practices pure evil (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly) because of the duplicity involved in mixing editorial and advertising content. I wholeheartedly agree.

Decide for yourself whether the Web is cluttered enough with unwanted and confusing ad messages. See the screenshot of the proposed in-text ads on my site above.

Here’s what the Kontera rep had to say via email:

As I’m sure you get dozens of requests to place advertising on your site each week, I want to make it clear that our ContentLinks work in conjunction and are non-competing with the ads that are already running within your site. Utilizing our technology is as simple as placing one piece of JavaScript into the HTML of your page and our technology does the rest.

ContentLinks are an ad unit that matches advertiser’s keywords to the text of your pages and provides your users with the easiest way possible to get more information about what it is they are reading about. We … are working with some of the biggest advertisers online. Due to the effectiveness of our technology and the ads, Advertisers are paying north of $.40 CPC and the ads are seeing around a 1%-3% CTR. Essentially for every 1,000,000 page views our publishers are providing, they are seeing thousands of dollars in incremental ad revenue that was once not available to them. …

I’ve created a mock up of how the ads look within a site and show you the dynamic ability to match advertisers to any page of content. Keep in mind that everything is controlled by you- the number of links per page, the color, the type of ads- we want to bring your site new ad revenue but we also want to make sure that you dictate what ads get shown and how they appear to your users. To get set up is simple, there is no contract to sign and no minimum amount of page views to provide. We’re simply looking to find strategic partners that meet the ever expanding need of our advertisers goals. …

Kontera, I should point out, isn’t the only company doing this.

And, oh, I turned them down.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.