Asymptomatic

I fear it is not working for me. When I added Contenture codes to this site back when they opened the doors to the public, I thought it was a system with a lot of promise. Today, I'm not so sure.

Looking at my Contenture dashboard today, I can see how much I've earned by putting the Contenture code on my site. A whopping $0.52. Any money is more money than nothing, you might say. But there's more to it than that.

I'm paying $5.99 per month for my Contenture subscription. Presumably, I'm benefiting from that in getting fewer ads and more premium content from other people who are using Contenture. I wouldn't know, though, since there's nowhere that reports the Contenture sites that I've visited in the past.

Worse is that while I'm forking out $6/month (the minimum -- they'll let you pay more!), and I'm only making $0.52 this month, I won't even see that $0.52 until I've earned $10. So I will have to continue to earn for the next two years to earn enough money to get a $10 check to offset the $143.76 I've spent on Contenture users that I don't even know I've visited. But that's still yet not the worst of it.

Of the $0.52 cents I earned, $0.08 of it was from this site. That much is broken down on the Contenture dashboard. I used my trick from RedAlt to use GetClicky to track Contenture visits and noticed something startling from the results: All of the Contenture visitors to my site are me! There were no other Contenture users that visited Asymptomatic during June.

Why should I have to go through these machinations to find out whether any users are visiting my site? Because the graphs on Contenture's dashboard don't work!

All of that is fine. I'm not expecting a huge return from embedding those links. I suspect that there are a handful of high-traffic, wide-reach sites that are draining the Contenture money pool of cash. My report indicates that my own 28 hits to my own site is what generated the 8 cents. 28 hits == 8 cents. So I guess if I just hit my own site 3500 times, I can make my $10 and cash out.

Alright. Assume I don't see a value in being a Contenture subscriber, even if I keep the codes on my site and continue to earn money. This is most definitely an option. All I need to do is unsubscribe.

Like many other things in Contenture, this is inadequate. There are no links to actually unsubscribe from my $6/month subscription. I looked at my email receipt for July's automated subscription payment and I don't see an unsubscribe link or a way to identify the Visa card I used to subscribe to the service.

I don't know. I really wanted Contenture to work. I think it's a good idea to produce a federated payment system. But there are so many glitches.

As a subscriber, it fails. I can't see a list of the sites that I visit to know if my money is worth spending. The benefit at any of those sites is kind of nebulous. Most of the advertised benefit can be gained by employing a free ad blocker. And probably the most important thing, I can't stop subscribing. I expect that last thing to be fixed, or to have some existing remedy that isn't apparent to me, but it's pretty astounding that there's no obvious method.

As a publisher, it fails. The payout is pretty slim at 3.5 clicks per cent. The method by which it protects the site is pretty flimsy. In most cases a bit of codemonkey script would circumvent everything but the most complex configuration for managing subscription-only content. The graphs don't seem to work. The interface for users who use the system is sketchy. And one of the worst things that I had not previously mentioned is that their "Sites who use Contenture" seems to be based on popularity (or at the very least, is not random as advertised). It seems patently unfair to push even more traffic to popular sites that are already getting the largest share of earnings.

Anyway, this is not the kind of performance that I've received from any affiliate or profit sharing system that I've ever been a part of. And that's disappointing, because it seems like such a good idea.