I tried their service and accumulated approximately $20-25. Unfortunately the keywords highlighted in context with our site’s content was not practical for our audience and started to impact our credibility. As a result, we were forced to cancel our account.

I must have sent 2-3 e-mails, complete with our account number, user ID, password, etc. inquiring about when we would receive a payment as no payment arrived after approximately 3 months canceling our account. All requests were ignored.

I then contacted them by phone and left a voice mail message on the Director of Finance’s phone (which also went unanswered.)

I finally got in touch with the Director of Finance who indicated she would not give us a check as their policy indicated checks are only cut after account holders reach $100 and proceeded by throwing in some story about how their system was not even capable of cutting checks below the $100 amount (laughable). I explained I understood the policy, however felt that would only be applicable for active accounts vs. closed accounts. After some back and forth, she promised to talk to the Dir. of Account Management but would most likely not get back to me until the following day. Sounded like a lie to me, and/or an attempt to get me off the phone. “Aren’t you the Director of Finance?”

She did not even give me the courtesy of a return phone call the next day and when I called Kontera on this day I was unable to get in touch with her after 3 attempts due to being cut off somehow. On the 3rd call the operator transferred me to Kontera’s Director of Account Management.

I shared our reasoning behind needing to cancel our account and asked him to cut a check out for us as we had not received one in the ~3 month time period after account cancellation. He simply said no and indicated the policy was not to cut checks out until the $100 amount was reached. I indicated this would not be possible as our account had been closed and that we were rightfully entitled to the money my employer earned through click-throughs on their clients’ ads. Again, he simply said no. I mentioned I believed this must be illegal and he backfired by saying if we wanted to reactivate our account and earn $100 we would get a check but I again stated this would not be practical per our audience. After some more back and forth I asked for the name of the company president and he initially refused to give this name to me indicating the policy applied to both open and closed accounts, that it was “his policy” and that the policy “would not change.” He only supplied me with the name of the company president after I indicated I would find this information on my own if necessary and I hung up on these jokesters. Thought it would be interesting to add that in my conversation with the Dir. of Account Management, he said “the reason why no one got back to me” (regarding the e-mails and voice mail) was due to this ridiculous “policy” supposedly applying to closed accounts as well.

Obviously pursuing this matter in court or writing up a formal BBB complaint would not be practical although I wish I could pursue this per the principal issue (they should give accrued $$ to those that rightfully earned this). This is a poor practice and insinuates those that cancel their accounts before a solid $100 increment will be penalized.

I just thought I’d post this to warn other publishers (and even advertisers) of this company… I don’t see them being in the business for the long term and surely their customer service is a joke. Looks like a number of others had similar problems dealing with Kontera, namely the author of the following article: http://blog.freedownloadscenter.com/2007/02/26/kontera-and-frauds/.

For example, you may view an article and see a double-underlined phrase and when you point your mouse over the link, a ‘bubble’ appears (such as the conversational bubbles you see in newspaper comic strips) displaying an ad relevant to that specific phrase. These ads appear in a variety of different formats, embedding text and/or static graphic ads or even dynamic flash video ads. Interestingly enough, ContentLink ads bypass built-in pop-up blockers in at least Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox so implementing this could prove to be a valuable enhancement to your web site, if practical.

As a pay-per-click program, publishers earn extra income if a user clicks on the ads displayed in the ContentLink ads. Per Kontera’s guidelines for new accounts, the program is currently limited to web sites receiving at least 500,000 page impressions per month although they may be willing to waive this guideline on a case-by-case basis.

Once implemented on your web site, you may need to fine-tune the appearance of the ContentLink links appearing within your content. Publishers have the ability to customize the link’s color, whether the link is to be single or double underlined and can program filters using span tags associated with a class Kontera defined to prevent ads from appearing in certain areas of a specific web page. Publishers can also adjust the frequency of ContentLink ads, preventing certain keywords/phrases from being attached to ContentLink ads, etc. via an e-mail request to Kontera.

In summary, ContentLink offers yet another web advertising stream for you to use that cleverly embeds advertisements with hyperlinks associated with your web page content. For more information, visit http://kontera.com/default.aspx?id=20 for a full overview of Kontera’s contextual advertising solution for publishers.