To start with, Komli is a leading ad network in India founded in 2006 by Amar Goel.
In their terms “Komli is about innovation and client service in the online advertising space. That might sound broad, but we think it helps us focus on what matters. We drive ourselves every day to build innovative online products and services for our customers and then work to make our customers happy as they use them. We try not to be a me-too company, doing the same thing as everyone else.
We are a digital advertising and technology company enabling marketers to reach and acquire their audiences and publishers to maximize their revenues. Komli Media powers India’s only ad network platform with solutions across lead acquisition, targeting, rich media and measurement. Headquartered in Mumbai, with an engineering centre in Pune, Komli Media is also located in Delhi (India) and New York (US).”
Recently Komli started an exclusive Auto channel where visitors can visit 15 most popular auto websites through their campaigning.
Komli has also started delivering ads to EBay India which is a fantastic start to their budding mission. On December 2nd Komli also launched ViziSense which is India’s first free and Open online audience measurement platform which helps publishers really look into their ads and know who is looking at them.
Thinking to open a publisher account at Komli? Then think again.
I’ll give you 10 reasons why Komli is not yet ready to make a difference in online ad industry.
- Only few ad formats are available. It has a skyscraper, a wide skyscraper, 350*250 square, a leader board and a half banner at present.
- Each of those ads available is only a banner and absolutely no text at all.
- The Gamut of advertisers is minimal and you find the same ads repeating again and again.
- They pay on a CPM basis (CPC also exists but revenue from it is negligible).So unless you have a huge daily impressions you can’t expect much from Komli.
- Ad appearance is very disappointing and they need to improve on this tremendously and no wonder your CTR is far less compared to Adsense.
- A condition term of Komli states that any publisher who has not been paid for 6 months is set for a immediate payoff and banned from their network.(Pretty harsh seeing their poor Ad quality)
- Ad loading time is far more when compared to other networks like Adsense or YPN. So it make a ugly impact on your site should you place Komli tags on top of your page.
- While Google concentrates on delivering Ads relevant to publishers content, I see no such effort from Komli and every publisher get the same Ads.
- You have no control over you ads unlike the previous Google referral system where you can display ads relevant to your content.
- No country specific Ads.
However, recently Komli in partnership with Pubmatic seems to be working hard on this issue of delivering country specific Ads.
Should Komli concentrate on these issues I am pretty sure that it has all rights to become a Giant in online Ad business as there are no full fledged desi companies in this field.
So should you run Komli ads on you site?
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I am part of management team at eLitmus. In our business, the guys who get benefitted from eLitmus never write on public fora and the ones who dont (because of their mistakes), make the most noise. I can understand Komli could be going through same. Hence this note.
My team when they started off, read similar comments, so gave the least lucrative property to Komli ads. Needless to say it reinforced what ever was talked on the internet.
In my montly review, I decided to give it a try. In a new part of our site, we gave them what we thought as premium position, the top banner. It did not work. I had thought as much but went with top banner in deference of wishes of my web expert team. Then we moved it down to the bottom. Things started improving. This is because the ads delivered on our site are mostly youth and nothing to do with content of our site. So when a visitor comes in, he is not interested in one of those ads. But once s/he finishes reading the article / posts, s/he sees a refreshingly different and fun ad. And lo … they click.
I agree with every one the click money is bad. But what has happened with period of time, they have started showing more relevant feedback ads. These make a lot of money for us. All said there are improvements, but I am sure all early stage companies will require time to catch up with some one who has been in business for long. Incidentally today our Komli revenues out did google adsense (typically they are 30-40%) .
Aseem,
I had a look at elitmus site and the only pages that I found some advertisements are in Forums (if I’m not wrong). As you said, the komli tag is right at the bottom and Adsense are at the top and at the right sidebar.
It is pretty surprising for me to imagine that Komli has yielded more than Adsense with just one banner. But since Komli is a pure CPA type Ad network, even a single action taken by your user may yield up to 100 INR. So what you said may be possible.
This site uses a Komli Pop-under and a near waste (just to fill the space) square box, and it yields only 5% of Adsense. May be I should take a leaf out from you and put an Ad in the footer.
Coming to the Ads itself, the lack of content targeting is a big minus to Komli. I put the same question to Mr. Akshay and he said that it was a concise business strategy to go for Banner Ads rather than content based text ads.
But some how I feel, Indian Ad networks are missing a trick in not entering into the contextual Ad network.
And about others complaining about Komli, it’s their personal experience and suggestions and no body should have any problems with it except himself.
After all, India is a Democratic country
Mr GM, other komli watchers and Publishers, I recommend you not to use komli at all. I have used it for more than 6 months and have made only $10. That is less than 1/100 of what i made with adsense in the meantime. So my advice is not to use komli. They are [edited]. I am going to remove their ads. I don’t want to wait any longer.
Instead of them, you can have CPXinteractive or tribal fusion. They are better i guess. Even adbrite will be better than komli. So if you believe me, don’t waste your site space with komli. There are more better options without komli.
@ Akshay
I am a Komli publisher.I use your tags on my other site but because of the low CTR I experienced from that site,i’m reluctant to implement on this site.
@kaippally
I always been an admirer of Munjal Shah for his work on the web, who is in the advisory board of komli.
No way Komli could be the ‘fraud’ one as you said.
Past one week due to internet cable problems may be komli ads aren’t appearing but not on a single occasion did i find komli ads not appearing at all,therz just been a slight delay in ad appearence.Thats all.
My experience hasn’t been too great either. Komli’s interface is extremely complex and confusing. Most of the time ads do not appear on my website.
There is no easy way on Komli’s website to know in simple english exactly how much a website has earned.
Yet another Desi money making fraud.
Hi Sriraj, dismissal doesn’t mean a ban. To ban a publisher, I think, would mean that the publisher can’t rejoin Komli’s network again. That’s not our intention. What we are just saying is that if you haven’t earned $25 over six months, we’ll pay you the amount that you’ve earned but we’ll consider you an inactive publisher for our accounting purposes. You are welcome to rejoin our network at any stage!
Thanks,
Akshay
10 for 10. very nice..
General manager’s these days even have time to see comments on their business on web?
Great sir,shows you passion for komli..
But i couldn’t agree on the sixth point..
Just sneak into the publisher terms and under the ‘8.Payment’ section you find a line which quotes “Any Publisher account that goes unpaid for six (6) months
becomes subject to immediate payoff and dismissal from the Network”.
Does dismissal doesn’t mean a Ban,sir?
Sriraj,
Hi. My name is Akshay Garg and I’m the GM of Komli’s ad network. Seasons greetings to you!
I’d like to, first of all, thank you for your encouragement. We are certainly trying to be a giant in the online ad business, but I can see from your comments that we still have some work to do.
I’d like to make a few comments on the 10 reasons you have enumerated for why Komli isn’t ready to make a difference in the online ad business.
1. Ad sizes — Komli supports all IAB standard ad units. The five ad sizes that you have listed above are the most common IAB ad sizes and the most common ones in India as well. Besides these in-page banner units, we support pop-up’s and pop-under’s as well. If any of our publishers would like to use any other ad unit, they are welcome to get in touch with us so that we can activate that unit.
2. You are correct that we don’t support text ads. That is a conscious business decision. To your point that we aren’t ready to make a difference because we don’t support text ads, there are plenty of large ad networks that support display ad units only, such as advertising.com, valueclick and bluelithium. We are in the display ad unit business because we believe that it has a very bright future in our primary market, which is India.
3. Komli Media works with most large advertisers in India. If the advertiser is live on Yahoo and Rediff, chances are that the same advertiser is also live on Komli. When you say that the range of available advertisers is small, this is not Komli-specific, but I would argue, a reflection of the economic and advertising slowdown that we are experiencing in India today. I (we, I hope
) expect this to be a temporary phenomenon.
4. Komli Media actually pays out on an eCPM basis. We traffic a mixture of CPM, CPC and CPA ads but you only see your payout on an eCPM basis, which is a metric that standardizes across the other three. I’m sorry to hear that your eCPM payout has been low — our account management would be happy to look into the reasons for the same and work with you to implement ways to increase the payout. Please drop an email to sahil.zafar(at)komli.com for the same. We work with more than 1000 active publishers and the vast majority of these publishers receive payouts that are higher or as high as the next best ad network.
5. The ads we serve are those provided to us by our advertisers. Komli does not create ads itself. The ads provided by our clients to us are also trafficked across some of India’s largest portals such as Yahoo! and Rediff. I appreciate your feedback about the CTR’s on these ads being low. While we can’t really control or influence this, I’d be happy to pass on this feedback to our clients.
6. Komli doesn’t ban any publisher unless that publisher misuses our tags, indulges in click fraud or indulges in some gross violation of our T&C’s. I think you’ve misinterpreted the relevant clause that only says that if you haven’t accumulated a minimum payout of $25 over 6 months, your account becomes inactive and Komli need not pay you.
7. Ad serving load time is an interesting issue — while I agree that in the past, there might have been occasional instances of server timeouts, our finding is that more recent instance of long ad serving load time have more to do with local ISP’s in India than they have to do with our servers. For example, we know that those people who are using a MTNL connection in Mumbai tend to take longer to see our ads than those on a Reliance connection, even when the connections are of equivalent speed. This is an issue of significant concern to us and our technical staff is working with the staff of MTNL, and a few other ISP’s to diagnose this problem. We hope to have a resolution very soon.
8. Google Adsense is a contextual ad network, Komli is a pure auction driven ad network. We could spend our days arguing over which one is better. Some publishers find that a contextual network delivers higher payouts, some others find that a pure auction-driven ad network delivers higher payouts. At the end of the day, this really depends on how niche your content is, and how relevant is your audience to the kind of ads served on your site.
9. Komli does, in fact, offer publishers the facility of blocking or approving ads. I do admit though that our approve/block interface isn’t as user-friendly as Adsense’s. This is something we hope to improve upon in the coming months. In the meantime, if you would like to get a better understanding of how to use our ad approve/block interface, please let me know and I’d be happy to arrange a training session for you.
10. Komli Media’s ad network is focused on India and Indian audiences worldwide. What this ends up meaning is that we are best off working with sites that have the majority of their traffic coming from India, but also some traffic from US, UK and SE Asia. We do, in fact, serve ads that are meant for NRI audiences in these non-India geographies. If your website is getting most of its traffic from, say for example, China, you should not be working with us.
I hope this sheds some light on Komli Media’s pros and cons. While we are not the ideal ad network for EVERY publisher, we do tend to deliver above-average/high payouts for most of the publishers we work with, and we’d be happy to work with you to address your concern areas and increase your payouts.
Please feel free to write to me at akshay_at_komli.com if you’d like to share any other feedback or concerns. Thanks,
Akshay