Adgenta Blog Ads – First Impressions Review

After a lot of hints the team at Qumana have launched the AdGenta advertising system for bloggers.

They describe the system as:

‘a post-centric advertising system. Post-centric ads appear wherever your post does: your blog, your feed, and search results. Each ad is based on what you think it should be, using keywords you define, not context a computer thinks up.’

The ads are not contextual ads – bloggers trigger them by choosing keywords – and they are not true ‘text’ ads really as they are image based ads which allows them to appear in both your blog and RSS feed easily. The beauty of them is that you can insert them anywhere in your posts as you wish.

You can see them in action at the Qumana blog.

I’ve not used AdGenta but have seen it implemented on a number of blogs. I thought I’d give some of my first impressions from an outsider’s perspective:

The Positives

There is a lot to like about AdGenta – including Payment via Paypal and a low $20 earning threshold before they’ll pay you. It also is said to work seamlessly with Qumana – a system that I’ve not tested because I’m on a Mac and it’s PC based.

The design options for AdGenta seem pretty extensive – they allow you to have control over 9 elements of your ads – much more than any other system I’ve seen. These elements are – Dimensions, Background Color, Border Color, Footer Color, Gradient Color, Title Font Color, Text Color, URL Color and Footer Font Color. That is pretty customizable stuff!

I’m also impressed that it seems you can track your ad performance on a post by post basis. This to me is great as it allows you to see which are your most profitable topics, positioning and ad designs.

I can’t see anywhere what percentage bloggers get from what advertisers pay – they say it’s generous and that they hope to share the percentage at some point to make it more transparent.

A question that is sure to be asked is ‘Can I use AdGenta with Google Adsense?’

Again on their help pages they write:

‘You can use both advertising programs without violating any known terms of service agreements. So long as you use the keyword field to drive your advertisements, the ads will not be contextual, and therefore will not violate your Google agreement.’

This is quite surprising to me as I’ve heard of Adsense disallowing site owners showing different ad systems on the grounds that they look too similar to Adsense ads – something I would have thought the AdGenta ads were in danger of doing. Adsense’s policy page says that ads that ‘mimic Google ads’ are not allowed.

I’m sure the AdGenta team have done their homework on this and this is a big win for them – however I’d love to get some direct feedback from Adsense on this before I give AdGenta a go.

The Negative

One of the interesting aspects of AdGenta is that they are selling it as something that you ‘don’t turn on or off on your entire site‘ – rather its something you insert in your posts individually. While I can see the advantage of this in terms of uniquely formatting entries it also doesn’t appeal to me on other fronts.

I’m thinking of the day when I discover that the ad design I’m using isn’t working well – or when I decide to stop using AdGenta and where I’d have to go into individual posts to make the changes. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding their system – but I have 12,000 pages of content on my blogs already – the idea of having to add this to all of them and make changes page by page doesn’t really appeal to me.

They write in their Help section:

‘There is no way to remove these ads as a whole, since they appear dynamically generated pictures.’

If I had to pick a weakness with the system this would be it in terms of the way I go about my blogging.

The other negative at present is that non Qumana users can’t use AdGenta – this excludes Mac users and anyone who is presently happy with the way they go about blogging with other tools

Will I use it?

This is the 64million dollar question I guess – will I be trying AdGenta for myself.

While I think there is a lot of positive things to be said for the system I can’t seem to get passed the one negative of having to manually add it and remove it from posts. For me to implement AdGenta across my 20 blogs would be a logistical nightmare and so I’m regrettably not going to implement it at this time.

Of course there is also the slight problem of not being able to use it via my Mac me not wanting to swap from using Ecto to another blogging tool to upload my posts to blogs.

If they can get over the non Qumana user issues I might give it a go on a new blog project that I’m looking at as it will be easy enough to implement on a new blog.

Otherwise – congratulations for the AdGenta team – well done on putting together what seems a professional looking and operating system. I’m sure it will suit some bloggers a lot better than it does me and that it will continue to grow and improve in time.