My experience with Content.ad

Content recommendation platforms are a trendy way for publishers to monetize their websites. If you´ve researched the main networks then most likely you stumbled into Content.ad, but today I want to tell you about my very negative experience with this company for the last 2 weeks. As you can see from the screenshot I attached, from 13 - 29 February I got 77 clicks from 6,037 impressions (1.28% CTR), which earned me ZERO revenue. This was from one after-posts widget.

I first asked about this during a support conversation I was having with one of their employees. This was with a live box that is permanently there at the Content.ad dashboard, and I had been chatting with this woman about a widget not showing up at one of my other sites. This conversation was going on without any problem, for something like 10 minutes, until I changed the subject and asked her about the 11 clicks that I had already received which showed no revenue generated. I said that I had read somewhere that they did not pay on a CPC but CPA basis, but I wanted to know how much clicks were estimated to be needed in order to make some money. She told me that she would "forward my question to the publisher rep team". Three days passed, nobody answered, so I wrote her back saying that I was at 26 clicks now and why were they ignoring me. No answer.

Four days after that I thought maybe this was just a negligent employee, so I wrote an email to the company´s main support address, saying the name of the employee, what had happened and that I was at 46 clicks now with no revenue. They didn´t wrote back.

I checked back the chat box with the previous female worker and after the messages it said "Not seen". Weird, as it also said beside her name that she had been "Active in the last 15 minutes", but I wanted to give it a last try, just in case they had a mess with their support software and their messages were not been received. So I wrote to the second one of their employees that appears at the live chat box. I explained to her what had happened, all my attempts of contacting support and the number of clicks I was at now (53). This time, the "seen" text appeared after some time, but 3 days have passed and she has not cared to give me a reply.

I checked their FAQ page to do more research and found some suspicious discrepancies. They have a section there for Advertisers and another one for Publishers. At the Advertiser´s, for the question "What is Content.ad´s pricing model?", it says: "Content.ad is a CPC (cost-per-click) platform.", whereas at the Publisher´s, on the question "How can the Content.ad widget generate revenue for me?", it says "... you make 70% of the revenue generated from sending quality visitors to these sites". Then, at the question "How much revenue can I expect to earn?", it talks about CPM by the end of the answer: "...Content.ad will optimize the sponsored content it shows to maximize effective CPM (payout per thousand impressions displayed)."

I don´t know about you, but I find those explanations very ambiguous. On one hand they clearly state they charge advertisers on a CPC basis, but then they do not say to publishers if they pay based on CPC, CPA or CPM. I looked through all the questions and just never found a clear answer. In my case, with 6,037 impressions, 77 clicks and zero revenue, I´m obviously not getting paid with CPC or CPM. If it is CPA, then why are they so reluctant to answer me? This all sounds to me like they got something to hide.

If anyone knows about an honest content recommendation platform which does not require 500,000 minimum pageviews per month please let me know. I hope this review was useful for those who read it.