I have been using Infolinks on my MBA Forum for quite sometime now and so let me share with you my views reviews and experience about Infolinks.
What is Infolinks?
Infolinks is CPC based contextual advertising network that offers In Text advertising also known as InLinks or ContentLinks. Ads are integrated within the content and so no additional space is required to display ads.
As always I start with the negatives and this time it will be no difference.
Negatives
- Low Per Click Earnings – If you compare Infolinks with Adsense then Infolinks has a very low per click earnings. We are here comparing apples with oranges but when both of them are CPC based advertising networks comparison is inevitable.
- Unrelated Ads – Time and again I see ads which are not close to keywords. On my MBA Forum I see ads related to cars for keyword MBA Projects.
Positives
- Global Inventory – The best part of Infolinks is they have a very good Global Inventory. MBA Forum is mainly Indian centric and Infolinks works much better than Kontera. Kontera’s recent product Kontera Synapse – where they don’t show ads if they think user is not likely to click actually means they have lesser inventory to fill. My Kontera earnings decreased by almost 50% in past that product launch news and when I contacted them it was not very positive.
- Adds to overall income without any banner space – Inline ads never take up any banner space and so you are never concerned about the placement and it adds well to the revenue. Intext links has never been a major source of income for me (See the break up here) but it adds to the final total. Apart from that I follow couple of rules for inline text advertising.
- I only show inline ads to guests and not to members. This gives me an added advantage to ask guests to register.
- I only show inline ads within the content and not everywhere in headers and footers. I find it very unprofessional and also on forums I make sure the ads only appear on the thread pages and not on home page or forum/sub-forum pages.
- Innovative Products – Infolinks have been very innovative with new products and their latest product – Related Tags works really well. The only problem is they don’t have reports to judge how this product is working but increase in earnings after installing Related Tags suggests it is working.
- Pays with PayPal & Payoneer – Infolinks supports PayPal but recent PayPal issues in India & they soon started supporting Payoneer prepaid debit card (More about Payoneer here). Payoneer is great for publishers in India who wants to keep their business out of PayPal.
- Good CTR – I have seen far better CTR for Infolinks then in kontera. 5 to 7 times better in CTR than Kontera and this compensates very well for low per click value and brings the eCPM higher.
- Works with Adsense – InText links not only are banner space independent but also works with Adsense TOS and apart from that I have not seen any decline in my Adsense CTR or earnings after using infolinks. Extra income is not bad at all.
- Highest Revenue Share – Infolinks offers highest revenue share in the industry i.e 70%. It is even better than Adsense which is at 68% and many other in-text ad providers give only 40% to 50%.
- Infolinks has Much Better Support than Kontera – When Indians had problems with PayPal, I was using Kontera as well as Infolinks and Infolinks reacted very early to email about the updates and steps they will take to solve the issues with PayPal refunds, where as Kontera did not even respond to the support tickets for 15 days and once I posted this on Facebook they looked into it.
Final Thoughts
I have been using Infolinks for couple of years now and yet I have very less negative points to share then positives. Apart from that I think Infolinks works better for majority of people because they have great CTR and world wide ad inventory and so if you still have not given them a try go Signup Now.
If you are already using Infolinks share your experience in comments below.