ONTOK – Not So Good

Futurelooks has been trying out a text link program called ONTOK. Basically it’s a way to highlight relevant text based on real product from real time price search engine, Shopping.com. When ONTOK found something it could highlight, it would popup a window of an associated product. That click would earn me a referral spiff. I was having mixed results with it over the last couple of months, until finally, the performance got so bad, I had to yank it.

ONTOK would slow down all my pages so that they would time out. Eventually, ONTOK’s servers blew a gasket, and went down. Not only did they go down, but Futurelooks would no longer load because their code wouldn’t load due to their servers being down. Apparently, it was a faulty load balancer. At any rate, I had to yank the code to return to regular operations.

Within two days after yanking their program off my site, I’ve noticed some very profound changes. First off, my Google Adsense revenue doubled. I thought it was just the content. Nope. Similar amount of unique users, just major increases in Google, and even my regular Shopping.com ads have skyrocketed. I just couldn’t believe it. I guess ONTOK was wreaking so much havoc, it turned people off from my site due to the constant performance issues. Now that the issues are gone, traffic has gone up as well after yanking the program. Literally, the pages would stall and timeout with the ONTOK code installed.

I think that ONTOK is a great idea, but the execution sucks. No program should cripple your site and give your users a poor experience. In fact, I think my Shopping.com has gone up more than what ONTOK was doing for me. In the end, I’m happy I yanked it, and I don’t think I’ll be going back. At least not until they have a stable and competitive offer. Maybe I’ll consider it again, or maybe not.