This post is dedicated to Kontera and Internet advertising frauds in general.

Since our site is rather popular we are being contacted by a lot of advertising agencies that want to work with us. Usually we don’t even answer to the ones that look suspicious, but after being contacted by Kontera and reviewing their investors information we decided that this company worth a try. We signed an agreement and started a test (for several days) with them.

The details of this contract are subject to non-disclosure, but as usual agreement it required them to pay us within some set time after the test ends.

Having different experience working with such agencies we were very concerned about the quality of the statistics they have according to which we are to be paid, and thus we decided to set up mirror statistics at our own site and use Google’s one as well. Once we received their first report (which covered 2 or 3 days) we were very surprised because their stats showed that Kontera’s count of impressions was a lot lower compared to that of our own or Google`s one. We informed them about this issue telling that we want them to fix it immediately and provided Kontera with our daily stats. Our contact at Kontera – James Loza – claimed that after checking everything with their tech department he found out that the stats they have are about the same as ours and there is nothing to worry about. After a long conversation we decided to proceed with the test.

Once the test period passed we received a report from them according to which their system counted less than 85% impressions we generated. We immediately sent them our own stats and explanation on how do we count ours.
Kontera guys replied that they will check everything and get back to us.

That’s how it all started to turn into contract breach.

Quite a few weeks have passed without any new information from Kontera. They didn’t get back to us first of all, and only after repeated requests answered with something like “we’ll deal with it today” or “we will send you a payment tomorrow”. Next thing that happened – our agreement with Kontera was broken by not paying us on time. We didn’t expect fraud from Kontera and contacted them for the explanation of update a lot of times. Well, there were no new information for us, both on the payment date or the amount they were going to pay us.

Finally, in the beginning of this year, after we said that we will start legal actions against them, we received a letter from Christopher Brown – Kontera’s “Director, Account Management”, who told us that we will get paid soon, as per our agreement. I notified him that the agreement was already broken when it came to the correct payment period and his answer was like-okay, we have our payment policy for publishers and you’ll be paid according to it.

Again, weeks have passed, neither payment nor any answer to our questions was provided. Then – ONLY AFTER WE FILLED BBB COMPLAINT AND NOTIFIED KONTERA ABOUT IT – they paid us within a few days.

Well, this payment wasn’t just a little bit late, but also it was done according to their incorrect stats compiled during the days of our test for which they claimed to have the same results as we do.

That’s our story with Kontera. We decided to post it in our blog because we think that publishers should be aware of fraudulent activities by advertising agencies.

P.S. After reviewing the draft of this posting Kontera finally explained why their stat were different. We agree that they didn’t fraud us about the final impressions count. While it still means that Jamez Loza was misleading us during the days of test.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 6:00 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.