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.
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Leave A Reply (8 comments So Far)
Hyper
2255 days ago
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.
Eric Scalf
2244 days ago
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.
Zach shine
2079 days ago
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