Chitika faces criticism from publishers Chitika, a new contextual ad network that launched in May, has come under fire from publishers in its network -- mostly bloggers -- who once sang its praises. Their eMiniMalls ads had been gaining steam among bloggers, with many reports of Chitika's ads performing better than AdSense on some sites. But once Chitika began auditing its results in October, revenues began dropping -- by anywhere from 15 percent to as much as 90 percent, according to reports on blogs like JenSense and ThreadWatch. And if that was not enough of a problem for publishers, Chitika is also being criticized for not telling publishers of the drastic drops until early December, so most publishers ended up keeping the lower-performing ads on their site for over a month before they knew the extent of the reductions caused by the audits. So it seems there are at least two lessons to be learned from this: 1. Transparency is good. Hiding things is bad. 2. Don't mess with bloggers. When they get mad, they tell people, and some of them know a whole lot of people. Source Chitika faces criticism from publishers
I just looked at my stats for January and there something terribly wrong when I make 46 cents for 10 clicks and my ads are no longer targeted to my site... I do believe ckitika is losing both advertisers and publish at an alarming rate... Discounting repeat clicks from the same IP within 24 hours (or so it has been said) is so silly... as visitors may be interested in more than one product advertised on my site... as my average visitors reads at least 4 pages and the ads change with every article...
Chitika has been auditing earnings since they started.... there was nothing new in October other than a flurry of new publishers that didn't read the notes on the Chitika website discussing what countries they pay for clicks from. Saying "anywhere from 15% to 90% is also misleading as there are many accounts of people (myself included) who had less than 15%. When I started with Chitika I read the documentation and saw they didn't pay for clicks originating from some countries. I reviewed my website statistics on visitor locations and expected the audit to reduce my earnings by about 20-25%. So I was very happy when the final audit was less than 10%.
Yeah I think people are abusing numbers when freaking out about things. The 90% reports came from people mostly in India who targetted local traffic and did not pay attention to the guidelines and information presented to them. I know for my first month of october I didn't have any revenue audited out of my account, yet I have not seen anyone report that anywhere.
Keep in mind that Chitika is in beta, which means there will be problems. Personally, Chitika has given me descent returns, so I do not have any problems with them. Chitika works if you get visitors from Chitika’s accepted countries and your content relates to your Chitika ads. If you get a majority of visitors from India and China (not accepted) and you have an iPod ad but you talk about dieting, Chitika will not work for you.
I totally agree. I also read about that guy who lost 90% of revenue. I couldn't find the article or website though...
I took my referal link out of my sig awhile back. Apparently having a referral link in your sig invalidates any comments you might have about a particular program or vendor. Plus everyone and their grandma has a chitika referral in their sig.. Having one is worthless right now. Maybe down the road I will put mine back... As I get good results from the program and it does well for me. This deal with delaying payments is annoying, and I do not like the way they have handled it, otherwise I am happy with the program itself. I sometimes just don't agree with their decisions. Like promoting internet hucksters on their blog.
Well since 95% of my traffic comes from the US 95% of my audited money remained. I don't see what the big deal is. Works for me and I got paid.
I am doing quite well with chitika so far. I would like better targeting, I use a php script to target to my product and sometimes i get video games for stuff that wish would be closer related to my page but other than that I am pleased, it does better than adsense so far