Komli is a premium ad network from India. I thought of writing this review mainly because 35% of my reader community is from India or Indians settled abroad. It is probably useful for others as well because that is the same cause for which Komli stands – they are targeting up to 40% of the international ad traffic that is India bound.

What exactly is Komli?
Komli started their operations in 2006 and what they offer is a CPM ad network program. Focusing only on Pay-Per-Impression advertising is probably the best workable model in India. There are not too many online ad networks in this country yet and hence they are positioned well to capture a good market. There are however, new players like iBibo who are soon going to venture into the online ad space.

Sign-up process
The sign up process with Komli is extremely simple. You just need to fill out a one pager providing your site name, address details and estimated traffic. They will get back to you within one business day with the approval. One of the things I liked about their welcome mail is that there were two simple PDF documents attached to the mail that explains neatly how to set up your ads and also how to use the reporting features.

Ad-script creation and usage
The ad setup page or ‘Tags’ page as they call it, is one of the simplest I have ever seen. You just need to select the ad size and you get your script ready. There couple of advanced settings as well, which they could have explained well on this page itself, but in most cases you won’t use them.

Once you paste your ad code on your pages, on that instant itself you start seeing your ads. This is another good thing where major players like AdBrite take up to three hours before ads are shown. The reason here is very simple – Komli is not a context-aware program and hence no need of crawling and caching your site before ads are served.

Reporting features
Although revenue reporting again is mostly a one-page affair, they could have done away with a number of checkboxes that the user has to select to see the revenue reports. It looks like; it is designed for developers rather than layman. However, the good thing is that what you get to see first is a nice dashboard that shows your revenue trend and eCPM (estimated Cost Per thousand impressions)

The story so far?
I started using Komli only 48 hours back. Although, it is such a short time to evaluate the returns, I had a chance to compare it with AdBrite as both appear on one page. At the moment the eCPM from both are not vastly different (< $1.00 per thousand impressions) and obviously not the best you can get. However, they have two CPM products for publishers off which I could not utilize the high traffic ‘Premium Network’ – Probably that is better in terms of returns.

As for the payment, Komli has both check and PayPal options for you to receive your eanings. The minimum payout is $20 or INR 800 and there is a 45 days of delay (Net45) before the monthly payments are sent out.

What I liked and what I didn’t
The approval process, setup procedure and customer support have been very friendly. However if they have to maintain leadership in the local market they also need to improve a couple of things:

The ad serving speed is not really the best – Mostly my Komli ads get loaded 2 seconds after that of AdBrite etc. Also, I found that some banner ads don’t have the desired quality in terms of their design and clarity. Unfortunately there is no control for publishers of the ‘performance program’ to control what they want to display nor they are any category or keyword selection possible. The good thing, though is that they have no adult or rated ads served on to your site.

Also, I would have liked to have a referral program from their side which could have given additional boon to the affiliates. I shall post more about Komli as I start getting more results and in the meantime you may visit Komli.com or compare it with other ad networks using D$ Comparator