Well it was just a matter of time... and voila... Chitika has introduced their version of Smart Pricing... Yesterday, my click through rate and bottom line was reduced by 50%. Despite double the visitors since I joined...
If you check out their blog homepage after logging in, they made an announcement today that they have changed their ads to try and stop "curious clicking" and that publishers may experience a lower CTR but they think it will be better for everyone (ie - advertisers) in the long run. My daily chitika revenues dropped 80%. Needless to say I dropped them for the time being... They were already border-line paying too little. Now they are just flat out a waste of time.
From the Chitika Blog: To help filter out so-called “curiosity clicks†that typically do not lead to conversions on the merchants’ side, we updated the eMiniMalls units to drive qualified clicks. Hence, eMiniMalls users will notice a dip in the overall click through rate (and hence the overall revenue). While we do strongly believe that in the long run everyone will benefit from our efforts to optimize this eMiniMalls (beta) service, we do recognize that in the short term this might lead to potential drops in revenue for some of our publishers. To best compensate for any potential revenue loss, we are issuing a network-wide 10% bonus through the end of November. http://chitika.com/blog/?p=23