Advertising on BrainKing

You might have noticed that I like to use BrainKing sites to try out new technologies and an interoperability of them. Furthermore, I like the users to play with it. The game site (BrainKing.com) was usually the main playground but since the blog site (BrainKing.info) is showing an incredible growth of traffic (see the previous posts about the site statistics), I have decided to choose this one.

On the other hand, it can appear on the BrainKing.com site as well, but can be turned off on the Settings page (paying members).

All right, what is it all about? The observant readers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed that I have completely removed all banner ads from the site, because they have turned out to be a waste of time and page space, regarding the drastically low income they could generate. Moreover, they used to be always the same, and who wants to see the same advertisement for the 100th time?

Just a few days ago I have started to experiment with in-text contextual advertisement links provided by Kontera. You might have spotted a couple of new links with a double underline at the recent entries of the blog. When you hover your mouse cursor over them, a short description of the company which provides the advertisement appears, and if you are interested in it, you simply click and visit their site. If not, just move the mouse cursor elsewhere and the advertisement silently disappears. Simple and effective.

I like this technology because it gives people a choice. The classic banner ads don't - you must see them, whether you want to or not. And although some text analysis gives funny results (for example, Firefox Extension is translated to Hair and Extensions Studio, most likely because Kontera says that it can take up to two weeks to finetune the text analyzing algorithm for our site), it can occasionally bring up interesting information. I have just spent about half an hour browsing the historical articles of this blog to observe which words or phrases would be turned to clickable links.

And, as the bottom line, I am glad to add a new article to the Advertising on BrainKing category.