Kontera Revisited
I recently had someone from Kontera contact me about adding their advertising to my web pages. They had previously contacted me a couple of years ago and I had investigated their advertising and written a review of it but they had obviously forgotten about that.
Since they had invited me to join (for a second time) I decided to take another look at their setup to see what had changed. The two things i was able to find out were that:
- They still don’t support Opera and still have their script set up so that Opera users end up downloading it even though it doesn’t work for them.
- Instead of the huge 18k script that they were using when I first looked at their setup they now have a 39k script.
This means that their advertising is now far worse than when I rejected it before.
They seemed surprised that I would be concerned about the amount of time it would take to download on dialup - no one worries about that any more they suggested. Well I wasn’t specifically concerned about dialup users since while they will wait 30 seconds for a web page to load, broadband users will only wait a second or two. This makes adding that much to a web page just as bad for broadband users on all but the fastest of current plans. If anything it is worse for broadband users because they pay fr bandwidth use and so are paying directly for the additional download while dialup users usually pay by time connected and they’d be using the time to read the page content anyway.
I can think of two simple improvements that Kontera could easily make to their script. The first would be to call their script from the JavaScript that sets the account parameters trather than as a second script tag calling an external script. By dynamically adding that second script tag from the JavaScript they could build in a five second delay so that instead of starting to load immediately after the rest of the page has loaded the page would finish loading, wait five seconds and then load their script. That way it would be more obvious that the page had finished loading without their extra 39k and those who realise immediately that they are on the wrong page would have the opportunity to leave before this extra download started. This would also make it easier to implement my second suggestion which would be to then wrap their entire code inside an if statement testing if the browser is Opera and not calling their 39k script at all if that is the case since it isn’t going to work for that browser anyway since they don’t care enough about that 2% of web users to fix their script to work for the most advanced of the browsers.
My recommendation for everyone else is to update the hosts file on their computer and add a line to it to point kona.kontera.com to 127.0.0.1 as that is the easiest way to stop Kontera from stealing your bandwidth. With that entry in your hosts file any web site using Kontera advertising will look on your computer for their 39k script and will not find it rather than going to their web site to download it. That will save you 39k of bandwidth for every web page you visit that uses Kontera ads and the only affect it will have on the web pages you visit is that it will not have the inline ads (which wouldn’t be there if you use Opera anyway).
Tags: advertising, broadband, javascript, kontera, web site, web users