Note: This review is not paid for. Just my honest and – in this situation – harsh opinion of an intext advertising solution.

InfoLinks is an in text advertising solution, similar to what Kontera and Vibrant Media provide. In fact, I shared my experiences using both of their solutions on my old video game forum GamingVidz.com back in 2008 here: Kontera vs Vibrant Media (spoiler alert: they both performed miserably). Last year I decided to give in text advertising another go around and decided to go with InfoLinks this time. I then proceeded to install the code on a limited number of my websites / blogs. This time I decided to steer clear of using them on forums, which are notorious for performing poorly with advertisements.

Income Results for 9 months:

For the past 9 months I’ve used them on a technology blog where I earned $328.81 off of 414,525 impressions (about $1.20 per day):

My average eCPM was $.75 and I’ll be the first to admit that I’d like to see a MUCH higher number than that for something as intrusive as in text advertising; however, in text advertising solutions like InfoLinks are designed to be a supplemental income stream – not the primary solution. Of the three I’ve tried InfoLinks has shown the most promise, but I’m basing this on my experience with Kontera and Vibrant Media from back in 2008. So I’m currently in the process of reusing both of their intext advertising solutions for a month each on the same website to provide you an apples to apples data comparison (I’ll do a follow up post when I have enough data to show solid numbers).

InfoLinks ad targeting and display is very poor

InfoLinks appears to have a lot of directories / small search engines that advertise with them because I’ll frequently see ads that simply use the double underlined ads like this: “Search insert advertising phrase on randomdirectory.org” and there are often several times that the images on the ads are not displayed for ads either. I’m sure if they improved the quality of the ads that were displayed through improved tracking and acquired more premium advertisers the publishers would make more money and in turn use the ads on more of their websites.

Wrap Up

InfoLinks is a decent supplemental income stream but it should never be used as the only way to make money from a website. I suggest you use it more on informational style websites and less on websites that do well with affiliate marketing. I believe the clicks on websites that do well with affiliate marketing are worth more than websites more focused on providing information. You don’t want a potential $25 commission leaving on a 5 cent intrusive click. In fact, I suggest that you analyze your bounce rate after implementing an in text advertising solution to see if it drops. Even if it drops a couple percentage points it’s probably not worth using an in text advertising solution. I’ll provide more data from other in text advertising solutions before I crown a champion, but so far InfoLinks has performed better than the dismal displays I saw by Kontera and Vibrant Media back in 2008.

What experiences have you had with in text advertising?

Note: I wrote this review at the end of February and already have nearly a full month’s data using Vibrant Media’s in text advertising solution. I’ll share my results with them in the beginning of April and then in May I’ll share stats from Kontera. If you’d like to see more case studies like this be sure to subscribe to my blog.