Saturday evening I decided to fire up yet another site to give Chitika one last try before I ripped it out and stomped on its quivering remains. Yesterday I had about 100 visitors to this new site (almost all from Digg and Technorati, no Google traffic yet of course). Lo and behold today I discover I had 6 Chitika clicks, 5 from the new site. That's by far the most I've ever had in a day. I'm thinking the CTR of Chitika is not just inherently low, as I had thought previously, but rather it depends greatly on the type of site. Much more so than even AdSense does. The new blog is about tech stuff: digital cameras, phones, GPS devices, stuff like that. Also seems CPC is better for this stuff than for Playstation games. Makes sense, since margins are probably better (and cost is higher or course). Anyhow just thought I'd share that. I'll let you know if this turns out to be a fluke.
Yes it can indeed be very good, but it takes much more work (trying out keywords and placement) than for example AdSense to see good results and on some specific sites it will simply never work well...
Definitely. AdSense will work for a much broader market. For instance, were Shawn to throw up Chitika on DP, he'd likely see a CTR in the range of 0.00001%.