Usu­ally, I don’t get too excited about new ad net­works — but since Con­tenture has been devel­oped by the team behind Clicky, I’m quite sure that this ser­vice deserves a closer look. The idea is sim­ple: by pay­ing a monthly flat fee to Con­tenture, users help web­mas­ter make their sites sus­tain­able. Via a JavaScript-Snippet, the Con­tenture net­works mea­sures users’ vis­its to par­tic­i­pat­ing sites and spreads the money accordingly.

Basi­cally, Con­tenture is revers­ing the clas­sic ad model: instead of gen­er­at­ing indi­rect rev­enue streams via AdSense and affil­i­ate ban­ners, web­mas­ters profit from their reg­u­lar users. I think that Con­tenture enters the stage at a quite early time, but basi­cally the finan­cial sus­tain­abil­ity will become one of the key ques­tions of the future web. There are some caveats involved though: such a net­work can only bring ben­e­fit to its web­mas­ter if enough users are will­ing to pay — since most surfers are even reluc­tant to pay for online-services, I doubt that the big rush will take place instantly.

But the team has obvi­ously kept that chal­lenge in mind and came up with a *very* tempt­ing idea:

Con­tenture is a new way to mon­e­tize your web site. Ad rev­enues are poor, unless you’re a big name — and even then, they’re still not that great. With Con­tenture, you make money for every visit to your site from a Con­tenture user. Fur­ther­more, Con­tenture makes it dead sim­ple to add pre­mium level fea­tures to your web site with very lit­tle work. Think of it as a way to take your site Freemium. For exam­ple, you could give pay­ing users pri­or­ity access to new arti­cles, exclu­sive access to your archives, an ad-free expe­ri­ence, and more. These fea­tures are built right into Con­tenture, but you can do even more with a lit­tle work on your end.

Now what’s so spe­cial about that? Think about it this way: dur­ing the last weeks, a num­ber of big affil­i­ate net­works — espe­cially Click­bank — have got into a strug­gle with sev­eral kinds of malware-clean-up soft­ware: once those pro­grams start delet­ing CB-cookies, the fun part is over. Con­tenture offers a much more sta­ble sys­tem and estab­lishes a mon­e­ti­za­tion sys­tem which doesn’t require any ongo­ing user actions. Once a cou­ple of pop­u­lar blog­gers start post­ing mini-tutorials or pre­mium con­tents (Twit­ter reports are still pretty hot), Con­tenture will expe­ri­ence a mas­sive grow:

Con­tenture offers web sites the abil­ity to (option­ally) add pre­mium level fea­tures to their web site. One of these fea­tures is to remove ads, but that’s just one of many. For exam­ple, a site could give pay­ing users pri­or­ity access to new arti­cles, exclu­sive access to their archives, spe­cial com­ment­ing abil­i­ties, and more. These types of fea­tures are built right in to Con­tenture. In other words, we’re bring­ing the Freemium busi­ness model to the masses.
Here’s another way to look at it. Con­tenture is the first that lets con­tent providers cre­ate pre­mium “micro ser­vices” through­out their sites. This is a cru­cial vari­able that other micro­pay­ment ser­vices have failed to implement.

And this is just the begin­ning — there are more fea­tures to come, like pay-per-article, tools for subscription-based mod­els and much more. In this respect, Con­tenture not only is the first “anti-ad-network” but at the same time a valu­able toolkit for devel­op­ing micro-payment models.

The pric­ing seems rather rea­son­able to me — the min­i­mum fee is $6,99. Users can pay more on an optional basis. Con­tenture keeps 20% of the rev­enues, which is very low com­pared to the stan­dard 50% of most ad net­works. Con­tenture works with all types of sites, but there are plu­g­ins for Word­Press and Dru­pal — the inte­gra­tion is one in two min­utes. There is no approval sys­tem, but Con­tenture reserves the right to delete accounts.

Con­clu­sion: Con­tenture arrived a lit­tle early, but the idea is great and from my two years of Clicky expe­ri­ence, I def­i­nitely know that these guys under­stand how micro-traffic analy­sis works. There are no down­turns involved — I acti­vated the Con­tenture plu­gin on datadirt today and I’m not expect­ing a mas­sive income stream yet, but I expect this to grow quite big. So it’s prob­a­bly a good idea to jump on the band-wagon as soon as you can.

More reviews:

Ste­fan Jacobasch on Con­tenture [in Ger­man]
Micropayment-Based Freemium Mod­els For All. (If Peo­ple Use It.) on TechCrunch
The anti-ad net­work
Mon­e­tize con­tent with­out ads?

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