Been using chitika for over a week now and would like to share with all of you that they truly SUCK. Well, their e-CPM is not an issue for me as I am not expecting it to be sky high. My website itself does not have much traffic, perhaps 8K visitors a month so im really not expecting hundreds of dollars in income. But their customer support and ad relevancy would get a big 0 from me. My website 'www.StudentBounty.com' offers 200,000 free download materials for students and teachers, so instead of displaying ads such as 'Homework Help' which are likely to get clicked, the ads being displayed are 'Dog Bounty Hunter' and stuff like that. I tried contacting customer support on Twitter but got no response. I even filled out the form on their website a week ago but still no response. Thought of emailing them at but unfortunately their server kept rejecting my email. I thought that displaying relevant ads on my website may lead to increased revenue for me and Chitika themselves but as far as I can see, they are least interested in any customer dealing. Here are my earnings. What do you guys think? Anyone can give me hope from Chitika or shall I switch to EPom?
I think you need to read more info on DP regarding chitka. I do not ever recall anyone using them standing up on DP saying they are making a fortune. Chitka just does not have the relevance options compared to adsense, simply because google has the advertisers that others dont have.... I guess if your site was related to "dog bounty hunter" then I suppose you may be fine, in this case, you have to target chitka advertisers, not the other way around.... chitka just does not have the advertising base to target every little thing, and therefore, targeting is very limited, if not zero.
Thanks for your reply. I'm not really interested in earning a 'fortune' through chitika anyway. All I would like is that the ads which show up are of relevance to the website content otherwise there's really no point in displaying irrelevant ads. I'm sure other publishers are facing the same problem. Is there no solution to it? If the support is somehow contacted, do you think they can have it sorted out?? Cheers
I would not be very happy about those numbers either. 5 clicks for the sum of $0.01? That's charity! Even those 4 clicks for $0.25 are terrible, but still 25x better than the first line ...
not even sure why people choose to advertise with them.... zero targeting means their ROI is probably low/zero too; their ads are displayed randomly to whoever is lucky to see them..... I honestly doubt anything will be sorted out, like I mentioned, they would have to have a huge abundance of advertisers to show relevant ads, and I have never seen the relevance there.... and I think that is their #1 complaint; They can not target what is simply not there.
I wonder if they have any advertisers at all... They could be showing affiliate ads... but the end is still the same, you have horses, they have pigs, still no relevance...
Hi, Alina! First I want to apologize for your not being able to get in touch with us recently. Our Support center was hit with a high volume of spam last week, which set off our mail servers so we were unable to send or receive emails for a period of time. This issue is now fixed so you and anyone else should be able to send us an email now. Please message us with your email address and we can look into any emails from you that could have bounced and why. Regarding the relevance of our ads: dscurlock, you are correct that we hear this plenty. Alina, Chitika ads are specially targeted to your search visitors. The query they type into the search engine before entering your website is what we target the ads to. So in other words, they are targeted to your users, not specifically the content on your page. However, in most cases the search term is related to your site, since they came to it via search listing. Also keep in mind that this means what you are seeing in your Chitika ads is not necessarily what others are seeing (since you probably visit your own site directly and not through a search engine). Our ads work best on sites that receive mostly search traffic. If you'd like to see how your Chitika ads appear to your site users, you can add #chitikatest=keyword to the end of your URL to preview the ads that your users are seeing. Ex: cellphones.com#chitikatest=smartphones. Remember to refresh the page after adding this to your URL. And regarding CPM: It appears that your site http://www.studentbounty.com/ may qualify for our Gold Publisher program, which allows you to receive our best-looking and highest-paying ads from our top advertisers like Yahoo!. Gold publishers see an average $2 CPM. I have submitted your site for consideration -- please be on the lookout for an email from us letting you know of your Gold status. I hope this helps- please let me know if you or anyone else have any further questions!
It's been over two months since you sent that message and still no gold publisher account for me. Do you think this amount is fair for 120 clicks? Less than a freaking dollar?
i think you just said the right thing: "it is very bad for my site", maybe you should try other alternatives?do a little test drive to see what will work better for you. Maybe CPM can be a better model for your site.
well what happend with me is they approved my account but when i tried to login with correct credential i got incorrent login msg. i reset my password dozen of time after that i open support ticket but they failed to solve it so they send msg "you account cloded because of faud click" BUT i never placed any chitika ads on my site as i was not able to login (poor english) and forgot to mention try epom i think it's better.
Alina, I know that. Even many here feel bad about this. Why not try out with affiliate and Adsense programs.
It's honestly a big waste working with Chitika because they are a waste of time and resources. I think the whole company is running on making money off small publishers such as us. I cannot get hold of an Adsense account which is why I am forced to stick to Chitikas crap which pays me $2 for 600+ UK USA and randomly eats up revenue for one complete day (22nd)