Why Is Annoying Only Annoying Some of the Time?

Yesterday Kontera announced a new $15.5 million dollar round of funding. Kontera provides in-text ads which are the ads that typically are double underlined on a page. When you mouse over one of the in-text ads, a “window” opens with a bit of info and images about the ad and a user can click on the ad if they are interested. Publishers are only paid if the user actually clicks on the window and visits the advertiser’s website.

I’ve run in-text ads from Kontera competitor Intellitxt for about a year on our sister site HTMLCenter. The results were strong in the beginning but have since slowed to a point where I will most likely remove the ads at some point in the near future. Earlier this week I noticed that Bing appears to be running a massive campaign with Intellitxt.

When the Kontera funding news hit the wire, Techcrunch writer Robin Wauters posted about the news and called the in-text ads “annoying”. He noted, “I find this type of contextual advertising annoying from a reader perspective…”

Last night a friend of mine messaged me after a “conversation” with Robin on Twitter about his Kontera post and comments. Here’s the conversation (my emphasis):

• Till – Do you realize the double standard when you call Kontera annoying while TechCrunch runs snap.com?
• Robin – why? you can turn Snap off as a reader.
• Till – That’s beyond hilarious. Next time, for full disclosure, I suggest you add, “TechCrunch runs the also annoying snap.com”.
• Robin – did you fail to grasp what I just wrote? you can turn snap off. clue. find it.
• Till – You can disable Kontera with an ad blocker. Snap isn’t less annoying. Just like spam, “please unsubscribe here”.
• Robin – you’re either retarded or trying hard to pose as one. disabling snap is a snap setting.
• Till – You don’t see my point. You call out a service, while you run something very, very similar. That’s a double standard.
• Robin – why do I get into insane arguments with hopeless idiots so late at night? night all!
• Till – Aside from personal attacks (Congrats!) – if you had your homework, you would know that you can turn off Kontera as well.

It’s very disappointing to see a writer for the so-called tech blog leader calling people names when asked about their posts. Insults aside, Till has an excellent point – one that Robin appears to have missed. I am unsure if Techcrunch is paid by Snap but the magic 8ball says “all signs point to yes”. Earlier this year I had several chats with the Snap team about adding the paid publisher service to CN and they confirmed that TC was part of the same program.

I guess I don’t understand how Kontera could be considered annoying while Snap is ok? Both services provide the same user experience. I am not suggesting any of the services are annoying or not – just pointing out that calling one annoying means calling all of them annoying – including the one your company is currently utilizing.

Snap, Kontera, Intellitxt and most other in-text services allow you to remove the service from your browser by installing a cookie via their websites. For Robin’s edifcation, here are links to remove all three services:

• Kontera - click the removal link at the bottom of the page
• Snap - click the FAQ for removal
• Intellitxt

You can also get to the removal pages directly from the windows each service provides. It’s important to remember that all of the removal options use cookies so if you clear your cookies, you will need to remove the links again.

Wanna know what’s really annoying? Going to a blog and seeing tons of links to a company directory instead of direct links to the source. Or even worse — rarely to never linking out to other blogs. That’s the annoying of annoying.