Google promoting Chitika?

Have you guys seen the adsense ads promoting Chitika? They even poke fun at adsense calling it Madsense and bearing slogans like the pic i attached below.
What's it all about?
In the end though it's about as useful to me as PSA's. My new site is a single page, high volume site. I've had clicks from it before, but these ads for Chitika do nothing since it's not a webmaster's page

 

Yeah I saw the ad aswell... Is it run by Chitika itself or someone else?

And what do you mean by not a webmaster page?

 

What's so surprising about it? You see clicksor running their program on adwords all the time.

 

Chitika didn't make that banner.

 

yeah, it could be someone marketing for them for that 10% referral bonus

 

Yeah I expected that...

 

That is an affiliate ad - see the teeny tiny "affiliate" written in the description.

Chitika just released banners for affiliates to use, but that is not one of them.

 

I mean it's not an SEO or traffic generator or somesuch site. The audience is work from home people, not web designers.

I was just surprised that Google approved of ads that were so scathing of Adsense.

 

This how the chitika referal banners look like in basic, different sizes though. But people can put their refereal code on to everything.

 

Is running ads for referrals against Chitika's TOS?

"Affiliates may not promote the "tagged" links via promotion on third-party search engines. Specifically, paid campaigns or SEO campaigns that link directly to chitika.com using your referral id."

 

I'm seeing chitika google banner ads with refferal ids

so you can do this? not against the TOS?

 

It is against Chitika's TOS