Highlights of web technology surveys, April 2011: Usage of in-text advertising is growing, Infolinks is the #4 advertising network

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 April 2011 in News, Advertising Networks, Infolinks

The jury is still out on whether or not in-text advertising is more annoying than more traditional banner ads. Some people hate it, some people don't mind, and some may even find it helpful. It looks, however, like in-text advertising is here to stay, and Infolinks is the leader in this advertising category.

Infolinks is used by almost 0.8% of all websites, making it the number 4 advertising network (after the two Google networks Adsense and DoubleClick, and Commission Junction), and its usage is increasing steadily.

Who is using Infolinks? Our ranking breakdown report shows that it's none of the top 1.000 sites, and while its market share is 3.6% overall, it's only 1,4% in the top 10.000 sites. That indicates that Infolinks is used primarily by the "average" sites rather than the top sites.

Our content management breakdown report reveals, that Infolinks of used more by WordPress and Blogger sites than by any other CMS sites. We see this as a strong indication than in-text advertising is more appealing to blogs and article sites, which is not really surprising. Please note, that in our surveys we don't count any Wordpress.org or Blogspot.com subdomains as separate sites. All sites in our surveys have their own domain, and this domain is in the top 1 million of all websites. We certainly do not artificially overestimate blogs.

And where does the increasing advertising market share of Infolinks come from? We can see this in our technology change report: While there is a significant exchange of users with Kontera, another in-text advertising network, most of the new Infolinks sites had used Google Adsense before, and thus seem to be new to this form of advertising. The number of sites switching back from Infolinks to Adsense is much lower.

The geographical distribution, as shown in our top level domain breakdown report, shows big differences: high market shares of Infolinks in India, Argentina and Indonesia, and low shares in many other countries, including Germany, Japan and Russia. Similarly, big differences in the content language breakdown report: only 0.1% market share amongst German language sites and 8.2% for Spanish sites. Whatever the reason for these variations, it looks like there are further growth opportunities for Infolinks.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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4 comments

Sandeep on 1 April 2011

I had used infolinks in my blog found it annoying to myself while proof reading the articles after publishing. So dropped it.

Tammy on 4 April 2011

Hey, this is Tammy from Infolinks. Your report is fascinating and I would love to share it with our whole Infolinks community. Thank you for sharing with your readers the power of Infolinks In-Text advertising. Feel free to email us at support@infolinks.com with any questions.

Tammy

www.infolinks.com

www.facebook.com/infolinks

David on 4 April 2011

Hello Sandeep

My name is David, I am a Community Manager at Kontera.

I enjoyed reading your post and I wanted to address some aspects of it.

In regards to which kind of advertising in the least intrusive, Comscore, an Internet marketing research company, provided a study showing Kontera In-content ads are among the least intrusive advertising options on the internet. You can read about that here, http://www.kontera.com/advertisers/research-results.

I would like to share some information with you about Kontera, that makes it the must-use advertising option.

Kontera is the exclusive in-content analysis and engagement platform for more than 15,000 web publishers, reaching over 140 million unique users per month.

Kontera is effective for so many different people thanks to our Synapse platform, an algorithm that rather than just scanning for keywords like other in-content companies do, can read your text for actual meaning. This added understanding allows us deliver relevant information and ads directly related to user intent,  leading to higher CTR and better CPC.

Another advantage of Kontera is our exclusive ad inventory from some of the biggest brand names in the world including UPS, Audi, Sprint, American Express, Dunkin Donuts, L'Oreal, McDonald's, HP and many more. These premium, often Rich-Media ads are the most attractive to users, offer the best possible CPC, and are only available to Kontera Publishers.

We're currently offering new publishers a 70% revenue share and a $50 Bonus if you get at least 25,000 U.S. page views during your first 30 days on the network. Kontera also offers a low $50 minimum threshold, good across all of our payout methods.

Thanks

David Stein

Kontera Community Manager

davids@kontera.com

Tammy on 4 April 2011

Wow, these numbers speak for themselves!  Infolinks is on 0.8% of all websites. This success is attributed to our guarantee of providing the highest rev. share in the industry. We are seeing more and more publishers make the move to Infolinks and we are thrilled :)

Again, thanks for sharing this great info! 

Tammy

http://www.infolinks.com

www.facebook.com/infolinks

support@infolinks.com