Today I finally disabled Infolinks for good. No, I’m not going back to Kontera either. I’m going sans in text links altogether. I decided to make the move last night after a comment from Laptop Briefcase, a long time reader on Blueverse.com. It wasn’t the comment that made me decide to do away with the in text links, but a culmination of things I’ve been thinking about over the past 6 months.
Here’s why I decided to say “Goodbye” to Infolinks:
1. In Text links are annoying and contribute to site clutter.
LB’s comment was…
“I am really surprised that people blanket their sites with the annoying in-content ads for a mere $10/month. In my opinion, the negative effect on the site outweighs that small profit. Basically you’re selling irrelevant links on your site for about $1/month/link. No offense, but you can get much more than that by selling text links in your blogroll. Plus they wouldn’t look like crap.”
After reading that last night, I had to agree and that’s what pushed me over the top. Making a few bucks is never worth a frustrating user experience. I personally hate the in text ads, especially when your mouse accidentally activates the popup (maybe that’s how they get their clicks…accidental clicking!), so why would I put you, my fine readers, through an experience like that?!
2. In Text links don’t make much money.
I’ve never made much from the in text ads. Infolinks was infinitely better than Kontera for this blog, but they still represent only a tiny fraction of the total income. This holds true with bigger blogs too as best as I can see.
For instance, when JohnChow.com was reporting earnings every month, Kontera links only made up 1/40th of his big month earnings. Sure he was making $1000 a month from Kontera, but my hunch is it wasn’t because of his click thru’s. John reported things down to the penny, yet Kontera remained the same month over month. That tells me he had some other type of arrangement with them. I doubt he would have cleared that much on a monthly basis if he was relying on click thru’s only for income generation from that source.
All that to say that the annoyance factor really glares at you when you consider the income potential based on the historical results. Not worth it.
3. In Text links slow your blog’s load times.
Although I don’t have specific data for this, I noticed an immediate improvement in performance once I switched from Kontera to Infolinks. I noticed a further improvement this morning when I disabled Infolinks. Sure it may only be a few milliseconds, but all of the plugins and stuff that gets loaded on an average blog adds up. Shaving off unnecessary plugins just helps keep things dialed in for as much speed as possible.
So what???…
I think an important lesson lurks in here. It’s spawned by a simple need to regularly review what you’re doing online from your customer’s/visitor’s point of view. An easy way to get clues into this is by just listening to what your visitors have to say. Making money blogging should be a result of providing a valuable resource. If you provide value, the dollars will follow. Sure there’s some science to it, but if you don’t have something solid to monetize, you’re going to be beating your head against the wall. That’s why the most successful sites are ones with great value. When’s the last time you saw an Adsense arbitrage site in the top of search results for a competitive keyword or phrase?
The other thing I wanted to mention is my action is also born out of a sense that we’re on the verge of a different way of monetizing blogs like Blueverse.com. I don’t think the old ways of making money blogging through ads, text links, intext links, etc are where it’s at. I’m not 100% sure what the model should look like this year, but I’m working fervently on ideas and trying different things.
Bottom line takeaway from all this: Constantly evaluate, learn and work to improve what you’re doing.
March 19th, 2010 at 3:21 am
I think you have taken a good decision. I too tried infolinks on my blog for few days but after thinking about user experience and how much I was actually making from it, I removed their ads from my blog
March 19th, 2010 at 4:12 am
I am agree you that infolink is lazy way to earn money. So your step is a leading way for others.
March 19th, 2010 at 7:20 am
Thanks for the post, Even I am thinking, after giving 151 Clicks on Infolinks and getting about 2.59 USD, that makes me feel very cheap,
March 19th, 2010 at 8:01 am
as a newbie for now i still focus on adsense, my income treshold is $100, after it passed then i will expand to another income source.
anyway, thanks for good info.
March 19th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
I would say, good choice ! I came agross some statistics a while back which pretty much proved your point.
March 20th, 2010 at 2:52 am
This is really true: Constantly evaluate, learn and work to improve what you're doing. Congratulations with your good move. Your readers will certainly appreciate this. You may lose something but you will gain much more.
March 20th, 2010 at 11:46 am
I noticed an immediate improvement in performance once I switched from Kontera to Infolinks. I noticed a further improvement this morning when I disabled Infolinks.
Australian Detox
March 21st, 2010 at 12:55 am
I have always told people that infolink was bad. I had had bad experiences with them for a good few months now! good decision mate
March 21st, 2010 at 1:15 am
You may get more than infolink.. It's too cheap
March 21st, 2010 at 1:10 pm
I am convinced that your decision, well thought out and logical is the right one and am also sure that whatever you come up with after reflection as per your penultimate paragraph, will be of benefit to all of us, your regular readers.
March 21st, 2010 at 6:34 pm
Good decision Ryan. Making money through ads on a website is a delicate balance. Too many ads or ads that are too obtrusive and you lose visitor trust and limit your return visitors. This also raises your bounce rate and decreases time on site. These are some important metrics that the search engines could very well be paying attention to. Of course it's going to directly affect your bottom line too. If people are spending less time on your site, many of your other income sources are bound to go down. For a website to really succeed, it should keep visitors happy and regularly coming back for more. So good job listening to your visitors and your gut instincts.
March 22nd, 2010 at 3:23 am
Actually I read in the forum about the info link and how I can earn money but after reading your post I made a change of mind
March 22nd, 2010 at 10:12 am
Sorry to say but I hate blog with infolink. Its make browsing the blog is hard experience with the words coming pop up every time I mistakenly put my mouse on them.
March 22nd, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Thanks for featuring my comment. I definitely agree with your move. If a site owner wanted, they could load their site up with popup ads, popunder ads, in text links, annoying flash banners, etc. The problem is that the more annoying ads you include, the more you piss off your visitors. Unless you have very patient or understanding visitors, they will get fed up with the ads very quickly.
March 23rd, 2010 at 12:22 am
Thanks for sharing articles. It very interesting
March 23rd, 2010 at 2:05 pm
No doubt you made a good decision. I rarely return to blogs that use infolinks as I very often end up clicking the links on accident and ending up somewhere I never intended to go, which I'm sure I don't have to tell you doesn't make me very happy about the original blog.
Good luck, I'm sure there are plenty of better ways to boost your income.
March 24th, 2010 at 5:35 pm
Indeed infolinks could be very annoying for users experience and i think it's a good decision to remove them from you blog pages.
March 24th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
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March 27th, 2010 at 1:35 am
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March 27th, 2010 at 2:56 am
In my eyes, all these advertising platforms are out of date later. The future of our income by blogging should paid reviews, inner content links, etc.
March 27th, 2010 at 10:28 pm
thanks for sharing thoughts, it really helped
March 27th, 2010 at 6:26 pm
I stopped selling links as our page dropped from a PR6 to PR3, and I suspect the link selling was the issue. So stopped link sales. Besides this, intext won't get much attention or payment, like you stated.
March 28th, 2010 at 9:42 pm
I agree, I have never been seduced by that type of blog monetization, the income is very low and we lost many readers that escape through that cheap links. Not good for me too.
March 29th, 2010 at 1:07 am
Interesting debate on type of ads on websites?
However, what is the best order of advertising on a new website and when to activate it?
For example;
-text links
-banner
-cursor over text…etc
Any good ideas about this so your site would not be cluttered with non performing ads and you would avoid spinning your wheels?
March 29th, 2010 at 3:29 am
I am really glad I read this, I was thinking about putting these on my site. When you think about it like that: $10 a month for all the extra ugliness, its totally not worth it. I had never liked the looks of them, but some people swear by them so I was thinking about checking them out. I think I will skip it now!
March 29th, 2010 at 4:18 am
Do you know what's important and what I have learned .. and yes I have learned something.
That this man … have gave up to a possible extra income .. because it had no future .. so it good to see that people sometime don't look only to the money and close the doors and go again on a different path one step at a time ..
Sorry to heir about infolinks .. but hope you will get something new ..
Cheers ..
March 29th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
These links make all of your pages so ugly.
@ Perfect Golf Swing, I am in your boat as well. I hate these ugly things so much. I wish advertisers would stop going with these companies because I don't think they are all that effective.
March 29th, 2010 at 7:01 pm
I agree: Constantly evaluate, learn and work to improve what you're doing.
Interesting post
March 31st, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Thanks for you story.
March 31st, 2010 at 7:32 am
Thank you for the topic
March 31st, 2010 at 10:21 am
…
Хех …
March 31st, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Good decision. We did use them in our article directory, but for about 10 minutes. It does reduce your load time and brings down user experience. Good decision
April 1st, 2010 at 10:53 am
Text link linking is all for optimise purpose. Nothing else.
April 2nd, 2010 at 10:02 am
it really good to drop infolink.we can do much work on blog to get much money.thanks
April 2nd, 2010 at 2:48 pm
I use Twitter quite often and it’s a great way to get FREE traffic to your sites. Happy B-day Twitter.
April 3rd, 2010 at 8:18 am
I have observed a slow loading time from text programs like Kontera as you say. And now that I think about it, I too might turn it off. I think if I do turn it off, it may give more power to the other revenue streams that I have setup, and in the end I think I will gain more as a result. I'd be interested to know, if anyone is truly making any real big significant money from Kontera.
April 3rd, 2010 at 11:46 am
I was just thinking to apply and use infolink on my new blog. Now I would need to think again – lol.
April 3rd, 2010 at 11:57 pm
Indeed infolinks could be very annoying for users experience and i think it's a good decision to remove them from you blog pages……
April 5th, 2010 at 10:01 pm
@Ample, you should definitely check out infolinks if you can. We use them one some of our websites and they don't seem to be much of a nusance to our users.
April 6th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
yes i am agree that infolink is a good and easy way of earning, thanks for sharing such valuable info with us….
keep it up
April 6th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
The difficult thing about this problem is finding out whether this decision really gives you extra readers or makes the ones you have stay longer and read/ comment more than with the infolinks.
April 6th, 2010 at 4:19 pm
I agree with American Bison that having these links certainly slow down page loading. Also I say that if you focus on key areas for advertising you won't lose clicks to "cheap links."
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April 10th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
I was thinking of getting infolink on my blog site. I am glad I have read on this site the disadvantages of infolinks. I won't waste my time.
April 14th, 2010 at 4:22 am
So far I feel comfortable with google adsense
because of google adsense has always been a lot of people trusted
April 14th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
good idea, this will really help your readers enjoy your blog much more!
April 14th, 2010 at 8:20 pm
Well you can always take everything a little farther, there are always new costumers out there
April 15th, 2010 at 5:41 am
Infolink is totally a shit.. it loads at site but paying very low.. I wonder why google dont try such things.. like info links etc.. your review about infolinks has increase hate about infolink in my heart
April 16th, 2010 at 2:19 pm
I think that you have made a very good decision getting rid of inf0 links.
Purely from a reader's perspective, I find them infuriating and a very large destruction when I am trying to read some text online. Although they may sound like a good idea, anything that distracts and annoys your site visitors is a bad thing.
A wise choice indeed!
Kind regards,
John
May 4th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I have never tried infolinks in my sites as i have felt irritated quite often in sites with in links. It quite dificult to read the complete text without having two or three pop ups.
May 5th, 2010 at 7:39 am
I think infolinks can be used as an adjunct to making money on the internet other than adsense, and my friend had solved the secret of how to make money from infolinks, each day he can earn more than $ 10 and it was real I do not promote anything, just sharing it
May 7th, 2010 at 2:32 am
One apparent disadvantage though is that the example ads on their site require not only JavaScript but also Flash in order for them to work and there is no indication as to whether you can set up the service without requiring that your visitors have Flash.
May 15th, 2010 at 2:41 am
yes , it is not the most efective way of making money, i agree
June 11th, 2010 at 7:43 am
Im abit of a noob and because i dont feel my skills and knowledge are high in the subject I focus on adsense, my income treshold is quite high $260 but I wouldn't quite my day job.
June 12th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
There is obviously a lot to know about this.
June 17th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
If i were with them i`d do the same thing. I definitely agree with your decision. They really have too many pop-ups that you know, discourages your viewers/readers which is one of the reasons why I didn't personally go for them.
June 19th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
hi there, please give me the instructions on how to remove infolink adds in my blog?
June 29th, 2010 at 2:59 pm
You are right.Infolinks doesn't generate much revenue
June 30th, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Good post I agree, text links blow chunks. What a waste.
June 30th, 2010 at 4:42 pm
The good ole days of Adsense are long gone my friends.
July 5th, 2010 at 7:27 am
Thanks for information about infolinks… I come to know adsense is best…
July 9th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
Good choice. You one the right way
July 15th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
Thanks for sharing