How long has this been going on? Am I just late to the party and this is nothing new? I find it rather ridiculous that Chitika would run competitor's ads on their site (see attachment for snapshot) or visit the page yourself: http://mm.chitika.net/search?q=chitika&client=xxx_linx&linx=1 But, frankly, I find it even more bizarre that this page would be linkable from within the Chitika ad on my site! Chitika has disapproved my site but I left the code on it because they were showing my alternative ads instead. Well, guess what? They still don't show any ads they pay for and now they've decided to siphon a little bit of my traffic (I reckon every 5th page view or so) into their own pages with AdSense on it. What the hell? I mean, how low can you go? If you look at their AdSense code, you can find that they've created the channels on late February 2010, so it looks like it's pretty new. Are you guys also seeing this?
I'm not sure I follow? Are you saying every fifth view on a Chitika ad spot has a link to this search page? Are we talking about Chitika Premium?
Yes!!! Not just this page. There are approx. 20 links to Chitika searches from within one 300x250px ad space! They call it links to popular searches and this type of ad they call Chitika | AdCloud . This is how it went down: the site gets disapproved (not enough data or other such nonsense), then in its Premium ad space you start seeing only Select instead, both coming from Google and internally. Then instead of Select you start seeing this. They call it Chitika | AdCloud. I can't post a snapshot here because it is my personal searches in it! Which if you ask me is in itself just creepy. I never heard of Chitika | AdCloud before and whoever dreamed it up was not thinking straight!
Holy christ, just noticed this on one of my sites as well. It makes a tag cloud of your own searches which forwards you to a Adsense search page. All code now removed from my sites.
Wow - I just signed up to use them and now I am really concerned. Thanks for the heads-up and is anyone else also seeing this?
Thanks for this post folks.. I just downloaded Joel Comm's Chitika ebook and was going to give it a try on my sites.. now I'm not going to waste my time. Cheers
Well that sucks. I bet both (Adsense & Chitika) are cutting into publisher commissions. The more hands in the pot, the less money for each hand! I'm looking into blocking Chitika Ads from my Adsense, the only thing is, If Chitika goes by any other business name inside the Adsense, it won't be so easy to block.
Well, the more I think about it, the more it becomes apparent that Chitika is just priming themselves to be happily acquired by Google. Who else in this industry would be SO incredibly picky about quality of publishers as to justify shutting down hundreds (thousands maybe - who knows?) of sites and rejecting possibly tens of millions of ad impressions per day? Well, make it: who else can afford it?! Another one bites the dust ...[video=youtube;gIdV4Y56gYM]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIdV4Y56gYM[/video]
Ha, Ha! Chitika sent me an email, saying some of my domains have now been approved. What a bunch of morons, those domains already had been approved & running Chitika Ads, months ago. To late bone-heads I've already deleted all the Chitika Ads from my domains, I'm not dealing with the back & forth random BS.
Chitika has started approving domains lately in three categories - bronze, silver and gold and the ads served on your domain are based on your category - I heard that gold category ads are more targeted and have better CTR%
Yes, I've seen this announcement made, but I can't see where they are actually reviewing domains. Basically it looks like after all the bitching they just moved those in limbo to Silver. I've yet to see any changes towards Bronze or Gold for that matter.
Yes! You can use Chitika | Premium and AdSense together on the same page because: 1. Chitika ad units are NOT contextual 2. Chitika ad units do NOT look like AdSense units
What Chitika do is show ads on your website linking to that keyword being searched on there mm.chitika search results and they strangely show google ads :O