I thought it might be interresting to see what countries Chitika filters in their audits, I assume it corrolates with the countries they show alternative ads, so I played a bit with my logfile. All country information is taken from the whois entry for the IP that was logged fetching an alternative ad. Now is is possible that method isn't totally reliable but I have also looked up the dns name for all IPs and tried to confirm it. Andorra United Arab Emirates Argentina Austria Belgium Bulgaria Bahrain Switzerland Chile China Cuba Czech Republic Estonia Hong Kong Croatia/Hrvatska Hungary Ireland Israel Island Jordan Kuwait Sri Lanka Lithuania Luxembourg Norway Oman Philippines Poland Portugal Romania Russia Singapore Slovenia Slovak Republic Syrian Arab Republic Thailand Turkey Taiwan South Africa The one I caught that I can't belive Chitika meant to filter was Ireland - I double checked this IP and it really belongs to a broadband connection in Ireland. Even Shawns geo locator says Ireland, Dublin. If there is any interrest I'll add to this list tomorrow when I have some more data.
Right that one too - the one indian IP I had in my list apparently didn't have country information in their whois listing. There are ofcouse lots more countries than this, but I don't have visitors from all of them yet
whois says it's AU but further digging looks like it might be in singapore. Chitika might be right on that one and I'll delete it from the list.
What about the Western European countries that are in your list. Chitika clearly stated they validate clicks from Western Europe.
I've looked a lot at Norway, Austria and Switzerland - they are positively shown the alternate ads, atleast the visitors I've had. I'd classify those as western europe myself.
My list of unsupported countries for about 6 hours: A2 Satellite Provider AT Austria BR Brazil CH Switzerland CN China CZ Czech Republic DE Germany EE Estonia EU Europe FR France GR Greece HR Croatia ID Indonesia IE Ireland IR Iran, Islamic Republic of JP Japan LT Lithuania LU Luxembourg NL Netherlands PL Poland PT Portugal RO Romania RU Russian Federation SK Slovakia TH Thailand US United States VE Venezuela Yeah, US & FR there, probably the free GeoIP.dat accuracy is off a bit.
Oh, if anyone wants to check their own log, this will give you a sorted list of every IP that has requested your alternate ads: grep <filname of alternate ad> <your access log> | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq Then you can plug those into a geo-mapper of your choice or to just look up the dns name of the IPs: for i in `grep <filname of alternate ad> <your access log> | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq`; do host $i; done
Excellent lists! One way to help validate them is to fill out the alternate URL variable on our own site (or experimental site) and have to a look at it from where each of us are. The filtered countries will not show Chitika. I can confirm that Switzerland is filtered because that is where I am. I stuck in an alternate URL for my blog and all the Chitika ads disappeared