Chitika - Too Good to be True?
I have been working on other things lately, but unless you live in a hole in the ground, you have heard about and seen Chitika ads all over the web. Chitika has been the hottest thing since sliced bread since their cool little ad units started popping up on blogs and websites a couple of months ago. Well, now it appears that there may be a problem. First, our man in Amsterdam Shoemoney, broke a story about how Chitika is using PostNuke for their account management on their website. Now, JenSense reports on what appears to be a Chitika auditing scandal, where publishers are seeing their “audited” earnings drop by as much as 60% to 90%. And, Chitika seems to have been pretty shady in how they went about making these audits by reporting them the night before payment is supposed to go out, today. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out.
December 1st, 2005 at 9:10 am
Forget the hype. As always you need to focus on maximizing the revenue to your site. Since you can use Chitika along with AdSense, (hopefully without hurting the AdSense revenue) you need to check to see if the additional revenue from Chitika is worth it when compared to the other AdSense compatable services.
I have three websites and I found that on 2 sites the Chitika effective CPM (after the audits) is still worth it when compared to the low cpm banner ads. On the third, it just didn’t work out. So I am going to remove minimalls from the third site but continue to use it on the 2 sites where it seems to be working fine.
December 1st, 2005 at 1:46 pm
Problogger in bed with Chitika early maybe not so smart
At first I thought it was weird how much problogger.net promoted Chitika. Then I found it even more weird when I got a email from Chitika telling me to visit problogger for tips on better conversions… Maybe its just ironic but perhaps maybe of t…
December 2nd, 2005 at 7:13 am
Chitika Publishers Furious Over Revenue Audit That Has Taken Up To 90% Of Their Revenue
Chitika implemented a revenue audit to invalidate clicks it calls “curiosity clicks” that I mentioned here on Nov 17,2005. Unfortunately for some publishers — and most it seems — upon checking their month ending stats some have seen upwards of…
December 3rd, 2005 at 12:47 am
Chitika Audits Kinda Shitika
I’ve hung back from experimenting with Chitika, the hip new contextual advertising program, so this info is all second hand, but a lot of people are reporting heavy earnings cuts over the past few days, as Chitica has begun auditing revenue: Jensense …
December 3rd, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Chitika Backlash - My view from the sidelines
Wadblog of course is now looking for who to whore himself err partner with in return for loot. Adsense from Google is kind of a no brainier, but who else is out there? Chitika is one who while doing my research I have looked at and itÂ’s interesting. N…
December 6th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
[...] So who’s to blame now? That’s what you get when you count your eggs before they even hatch. As Marc quipped, “If it’s too good to be true, it ain’t”. [...]
December 12th, 2005 at 9:37 am
Chtika is doing more than using an insecure backend, and shady auditing practices. They are using misleading copy in their ad units. According to Chitika, advertisers bid to be listed as the “best deal” for any particular product. The high bid is listed on the product information page (and the “best deals” tab on smaller units) as being the best deal, whether or not the company provides the lower price.
May 25th, 2006 at 10:50 pm
DataFeedFile.com has a Chitika alternative…
I found this site because I was kind of po when I received a rejected email from Chitika… so I went searching for alternatives.
Chitika turned me down due to not enough traffic on my blog. Fortunately I found a similar service based on a much more fair and open market. DataFeedFile.com is a similar service with much more options and banner sizes to choose from.
What I like about DataFeedFile.com is they allow you to choose what merchant to display products for. DataFeedFile.com seems to be a colaboration of hundreds of merchants from the affiliate industry. Check them out yourself, http://www.DataFeedFile.com.
Zach Zach