A little bird whispered in my ear that Videotron now has more than100,000 cable telephony subscribers, which means it has added another 25,000 customers in the past six weeks. This is about the limit that Videotron can currently handle given it does a truck roll for each new customer. The company recently raised the prices of its long-distance plans, perhaps as a way to claw back some of the money it has "left on the table" by charging its best customers just $15.95 a month for phone service.

 

 

In a post earlier today on Vonage, you may have noticed an ad on the bottom - something I haven't featured before. It is a result of a new advertising network called AdGenta launched recently by Vancouver-based Qumana Inc.  Tris Hussey, who has the enviable job of being Qumana's chief blogger, said AdGenta is aimed at bloggers who want an easy way to insert ads without having to fool around with HTML code and/or jump into bed with AdSense. "We're going for bloggers who want to take it to the next level," he said, adding Qumana hopes AdGenta will wake up advertisers to the reality the blogosphere is really open for business. Using AdGenta is straightforward: you download the Qumana Editor and then follow a few easy steps to register for AdGenta. For those not familiar with Qumana, its editor makes it easy for bloggers to publisher to a variety of blogging platforms in a Word-like environment. Until yesterday, I hadn't used the editor but was quite impressed after playing around with it for a couple hours. For multi-blog bloggers, Qumana is a must-have tool. As for AdGenta, there are two ways to incorporate ads. You can click on the "advertising button" and a keyword-driven ad is automatically popped into your post. It is also possible to fine tune an ad by using a tool that lets you punch in your own keywords. My early take on AdGenta's potential is it hinges on three factors: Qumana's ability to attract advertisers, particularly well-known brands, to the AdGenta network; the willingness of blog readers to click on the ads, and enough click-through activity to convince advertisers to come on board. Qumana is clearly hoping the click-through rate will be healthy because the ads are topically connected to the posts being read - if the ads don't work Qumana and bloggers make no money.

The bottom line: if AdGenta can gain some momentum, it has the potential to emerge as a user-friendly alternative to AdSense. I'm going to try AdGenta from time to time for the next month to see how effective it is. If it can beat the $39 that I've made so far this month from AdSense, maybe I'll give up Google!