The move was not easy at the beginning as we strive to have long term relationships with Internet advertising providers even if it means to miss opportunities. We did ran into some invoicing issues with Vibrant Media which definitely fueled the decision to move. We were contacted by one of Kontera’s business development managers who convinced us that Kontera would be able to monetize the website better which essentially meant more revenue for us.

We did not run blindly into this though as we have been burned quite a few times in the past by Internet advertising agencies who claimed to up the revenue but failed to deliver. Kontera was easy to setup on the blog as they provided access to a WordPress plugin. Took a couple of minutes to install and configure the plugin and everything was set to go. One of the differences between Kontera and Intellitxt is that the former allows to change the color of the links while the latter does not. Kontera managed to reach the same level of revenue that Intellitxt provided but managed to surpass that after the first week. We are now at about 150% of the Intellitxt revenue.

Every website on the other hand is different and performance can therefor vary quite a bit depending on your site’s niche, language and other factors.

One way to do that would be to block cookies of those Internet advertising networks. It also works to clear cookies after every session but there is a better way. Many Internet advertising networks are providing ways to opt-out of behavioral targeting by setting so called opt-out cookies on the user’s computer system.

If an opt-out cookie is present they will not track and analyze the user by placing additional cookies on his computer system. The major problem here is that there are hundreds of online advertising companies that use behavioral targeting in some of their advertising campaigns.

A user following that manual approach would have to locate the website of the Internet advertising network and there the page where the opt-out cookie could be set. This would take days and the chance would be high that a lot of networks would be missed.

Privacy Choice was mentioned in yesterday’s post about Google’s new behavioral ads. The website provides the means to opt-out of behavioral targeting of dozens of ad networks including major ones like Google AdSense, DoubleClick, Yahoo! and AOL.

A click on the opt-out button on the main page of Privacy Choice will set all opt-out cookies that are currently provided by the service. This may take up to a minute as several connections to the various internet advertising agencies are established to set the cookie.

The only thing that you need to be aware of is that the opt-out cookie is a normal web browser cookie that will get deleted if you clear all of your cookies. You would need to set the opt-out cookie again after clearing the cookies of the web browser.